From owner-freebsd-stable Tue Sep 19 19:10:47 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from scrabble.freeuk.net (scrabble.freeuk.net [212.126.144.6]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9E69837B422; Tue, 19 Sep 2000 19:10:34 -0700 (PDT) Received: from du-004-0133.freeuk.com ([212.126.149.133] helo=cream.org) by scrabble.freeuk.net with esmtp (Exim 3.12 #1) id 13bZLA-0005nW-00; Wed, 20 Sep 2000 03:10:29 +0100 Content-Length: 2522 Message-ID: X-Mailer: XFMail 1.3 [p0] on FreeBSD X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 03:10:25 +0100 (BST) From: Andrew Boothman To: Kris Kennaway Subject: Re: erlang port -- a poster child (Re: I'll be rolling a 4.1.1 r Cc: olgeni@uli.it, ruslan@shevchenko.kiev.ua, seb@bluetail.com, Ade Lovett , ports@FreeBSD.org, mi@aldan.algebra.com, Neil Blakey-Milner , doc@FreeBSD.org, stable@FreeBSD.org, jkh@winston.osd.bsdi.com Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG [Now CC'ed to -doc as this is a Docs issue now] On 18-Sep-00 Kris Kennaway wrote: > On Mon, 18 Sep 2000, Neil Blakey-Milner wrote: > >> I agree with the "if it's not in a PR, it doesn't exist" sentiment quite >> a bit - PRs contain information specific to a certain problem, and that >> allows me to look at your PR in tkgnats and discover it's being >> neglected, instead of just wondering what's up, and considering setting >> it to feedback to see what's up. > > What this really boils down to is the same as in another thread recently - > committers are a scarce resource, and so the submitter needs to do what he > can to make the most efficient use of the resource (if he or she wants to > get his change committed in a timely fashion). We've had some good > suggestions here - the best thing would be to write up something for the > handbook on "How to make the best use of FreeBSD committers to get changes > applied", as Jordan has already suggested. Agreed. Here's my synopsis of what should go into such a document (probably changes to the existing "How To Contribute" page - http://www.FreeBSD.org/handbook/contrib-how.html ) * File all changes to either source, docs or a port as a PR under the appropriate catagory. And a message, or a CC of the PR, should be sent to the maintainer. * If the PR is for a port make sure that "port update" is in the synopsis field, if only so that it catches Neil Blakey-Milner's regular check for such PR's, but also to act as a good description. * If you are the MAINTAINER of a piece of code (or more likely a port) and don't have commit privs, put "MAINTAINER update" in the synopsis, for the same reasons as before. * If no reply is recieved within 1-2 weeks, then a reply to the PR should be sent to gnats-submit@FreeBSD.org detailing the attempts made to contact the maintainer. * Do we then recommend a general e-mail to -doc, -ports, -hackers or whatever the appropriate "development" list is, to find a more interested committer who may want to look at the PR? I don't think we should talk down the PR system in the Handbook, after all we do want to encourage people to take the time to write PRs. However, a carefully worded phrase to ensure that nobody has any "unrealistic expectations of the process" as Jordan democratically put it, should probably be included. I don't really have much experience of all this, I'm just trying to surmise what others have been saying. How have I done? --- Andrew Boothman http://sour.cream.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message