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Date:      Wed, 7 Jan 2004 01:13:00 +0100
From:      "Simon L. Nielsen" <simon@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Colin Percival <colin.percival@wadham.ox.ac.uk>
Cc:        freebsd-chat@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Where is FreeBSD going?
Message-ID:  <20040107001258.GA742@arthur.nitro.dk>
In-Reply-To: <6.0.1.1.1.20040106204233.04436d28@imap.sfu.ca>
References:  <Pine.LNX.4.44.0401061417540.17348-100000@pancho> <6.0.1.1.1.20040106204233.04436d28@imap.sfu.ca>

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[Moving to -chat, which is a more appropriate list for this IMO]

On 2004.01.06 20:52:37 +0000, Colin Percival wrote:
> At 20:31 06/01/2004, Mark Linimon wrote:
> >There are hundreds of PRs still to be processed that do have
> >patches -- in fact, on most days the backlog is getting bigger,
> >not smaller.
>=20
>   Speaking of which... if there's one thing which could be done
> to improve committer / non-committer relations, it would be to
> *do* something with all those PRs.

[Note that my experience is mainly with doc stuff, and I have only been
a committer for about 6 months]

Indeed, but it's not as easy as it sounds (well, I don't know if it
sounds easy...).  The biggest problem is that there is only so many
hours in a day, and only so much time can be spend on FreeBSD.  A lot of
PR's does take quite some time to work at before they can be
closed/comitted, and quite frankly it can often be a bit boring to
fix/work on PR's.  The PR's are valuable, but often it's more fun to
work on the things I want to do, and since nobody (well, most anyway)
aren't getting paid to work on FreeBSD it has be be fun, at least some
of the time.

I really would like to be able to fix all PR's, since I do remember how
frustrating it feels when nobody responds and a PR just remains open,
but...

If somebody finds a way to make 48 hours in a day, please let me know ;).

Another issue is of course that quite a lot of PR's (mainly src related,
less often a problem for doc stuff) have way to little information to
make it possible to find out what the problem is, but that's another
matter.

[snip]

> But I
> think the contributions of non-committers could make FreeBSD
> even better,

I doubt anyone would argue against that.

> and those contributions are being largely lost or
> ignored.

I don't know if I would say that it's that bad, but yes it could be a
lot better.  I also have to point people at
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing/index.html
now we are, more or less, on the subject :-).

Filing followups to PR's with a really does help (even if no committer
starts working on the PR immediately.  E.g. submitting a patch, stating
that an inactive PR is still a problem in a new release (or if it's
not), doing additional research into the problem, and so on will make it
more likely that the problem will be fixed.

The less work that the committer has to be do to close a PR, the more
likey it is that the problem/PR will be fixed...

--=20
Simon L. Nielsen
FreeBSD Documentation Team

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