Re: Opinion polls UIKit and Website...

[Graham Lee]

On 20 Dec 2013, at 12:00, Richard Frith-Macdonald 
<richardfrithmacdonald@gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> On 20 Dec 2013, at 11:34, Graham Lee <graham@iamleeg.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 20 Dec 2013, at 10:50, David Chisnall <theraven@sucs.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> On the UIKit side... patches welcome.
>> 
>> That assertion is not demonstrated in practice. There are bugs with patches 
>> attached in Savannah going back years, and the patches section has something 
>> still there from 2004. Saying “we want patches” is one thing, but if they’re 
>> not accepted then contributors will feel unwelcome and will move on.
> 
> Solrry Graham, but that's reading thjings completely wrongly ... of course 
> there are patches still around but that's not a measure of the patches which 
> have been accepted!
> 
> Certainly some patches aren't accepted (and can't be accepted) for various 
> reasons, but generally patches *do* get accepted and mainteners of the 
> various parts of the project do their best to edit faulty patches into shape 
> so that they can be used (this is very different from many projects where 
> maintainers often repeatedly tell people to re-do patches until they are in 
> perfect condition to apply).
> 
> I agree that it looks bad to leave patches around for years (usually waiting 
> for the contributers to revise them, assign copyright, or even just clarify 
> their intentions), and it would be good for those older patches (which are 
> realistically never going to be updated/fixed by the contributors) to be 
> removed.
> But really the openness to patches is amply demonstrated by the fact that 
> there are so few which don't get used!
> 

I appreciate that position, and it means that there must be a disconnect 
between what maintainers see as an active project that’s accepting patches and 
what contributors see, which is a long stale list of open bug reports and 
unaccepted patches. More to limit the scope of a search than out of 
selfishness, I decided to look at patches I’d submitted. There are 12 open 
items, with the earliest submitted on Feb 17 2012. Of these 12 items, 3 are 
marked Fixed (but still open) and one Ready for Test (which has actually been 
integrated). One of the remaining 8 has a question to me that I haven’t 
followed up on yet, the remaining 7 have never had anything happen since 
submission. So if I need to "revise them, assign copyright, or even just 
clarify their intentions”, the communication I’ve had isn’t making that at all 
obvious for half of the submissions. Rather, you can come to savannah and see 
this:

1. GNUstep has loads of open bugs, some of which haven’t been touched in years.
2. Half of those bugs have never even been acknowledged or triaged.
3. Oh, actually when I dig in a little I see that some of the open bugs have 
actually been fixed. Should I work on a patch for this other thing or has it 
actually been fixed and no-one updated the database?

Graham.