From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Feb 28 13:13:48 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mired.org (dsl-64-192-6-133.telocity.com [64.192.6.133]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 951E737B41B for ; Thu, 28 Feb 2002 13:13:38 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 19517 invoked by uid 100); 28 Feb 2002 21:13:35 -0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15486.40319.364131.742634@guru.mired.org> Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 15:13:35 -0600 To: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen) Cc: Cliff Sarginson , questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Making suggestions In-Reply-To: References: <15486.16377.247443.721174@guru.mired.org> X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ From: "Mike Meyer" X-Delivery-Agent: TMDA/0.46 (Python 2.2; freebsd-4.5-STABLE-i386) Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Gary W. Swearingen types: > "Mike Meyer" writes: > I'm afraid that I was probably the guilty reply-er. Not long before > that a committer told me that he'd rather see the code changed than > explain some "feature" in the man page I had PR'd. I explained why I > had written the PR on the man page rather than the program: "... I > assume that no-patch design enhancement PRs are generally unwelcome and > are likely to be a waste of my and others' time." He replied "Indeed." > It's clear now that I took his reply too seriously. (I hope.) Sorry. Yes, but.... Let me do some air-clearing. A PR with a patch is easy for a committer to deal with, assuming it's in part of the repository they can commit to. You examine the patch, decide whether or not it's appropriate, if it is you make sure it works, tweaking as necessary for style(9) conformance and similar things. Then you commit it. If a PR doesn't have a patch, the person doing something with it has to figure out how to make it happen, which is a different kind of task entirely. That doesn't mean that all PRs without patches are ignored. Some committers may ignore them. Others don't. In particular, if you've got an easily reproducible panic and can post stack traces from a kernel with symbols, you're liable to get a patch to test relatively soon. Finally, even if no committer ever looks at it, people pop up at random intervals on various lists - including -questions - asking "How can I contribute to the project." The standard answer is that they should go through the PR database, and look for things that they can fix. Since it's trivial to get a list of open PR's you submitted, you can answer such a question with "Here are the URL's to things I'd like to see added. Why don't you choose one or more, and then reply to them with patches that implement them?". http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message