On Sat, 12 Apr 2003, Andreas Mohr wrote:
P.S.: Alexandre, I'd REALLY like you to finally put a patch status tracking system in place. The number of people submitting patches for the second, third, bazillionth time is astonishing (I speak from my very own experience, too!). I really don't know how many very valuable Wine patches got lost due to not getting applied without any status reply whatsoever... (particularly the ones from "foreigners") Someone recently said (in WWN) that patch management was perfect or something to that extent. I better don't comment on that statement, you know my hot temper ;) OK, it's definitely not awful, but I guess it could be better.
First off, I don't think the current system is bad. Second, I was the one this in the WWN (so sue me :P). Any system that we would put in place would have to work with email just like the current one. Other suck big time, see the SF one. Once you notice that, you realize that the problem is not the system, but rather that Alexandre needs to reply to patches he rejects, wether through email/web based form/what have you.
Don't get me wrong -- I've been multiple times at the rejecting end of this, and it's frustrating. But in retrospective, it's all for a better Wine, and I'd be hard pressed to produce a patch which got rejected by Alexandre, and which I still think should be applied.
Also, your assesment that 'very many valuable Wine patches got lost' is a gross exageration. In fact, please produce 3 such patches that got lost in the last year (heck, in the last 3 years for that matter). I think you'll have a hard time finding a single such patch in the last X years (choose X as you may) that match your description.
There is good reason for this: people put work into their patches, and if they don't get apply, they ask why. This is where I don't understand Alexandre: he will eventually have to reply to such questions, why not do it proactively, it's the same amount of work, me thinks. But I'm not the one putting in the time and effort to sort through the patches, so I may be missing many things.
"Dimitrie O. Paun" dimi@intelliware.ca writes:
There is good reason for this: people put work into their patches, and if they don't get apply, they ask why. This is where I don't understand Alexandre: he will eventually have to reply to such questions, why not do it proactively, it's the same amount of work, me thinks. But I'm not the one putting in the time and effort to sort through the patches, so I may be missing many things.
There are multiple factors here, I'll try to explain the process a bit more:
First, if a patch is obviously wrong, I send a reply right away; if it's obviously correct I apply it right away. But some patches are in between; they need some more thought or investigations to determine if they are OK or not. So in that case I put them aside and move on to the next patch; the idea is to provide quick turn around on the obvious patches. And hopefully it encourages people to submit easier patches, or provide better explanations...
Then when I'm through with the obvious things I come back to the pending patches; and when doing that I give a higher priority to the more recent patches. The idea is that older patches are more likely to no longer apply, or to have been superseded by a more recent one, or to have had someone else comment on them. Again the idea is to spend time first on things that are more likely to be applied. The result here is that after being pending for a week or two, a patch becomes very low in priority; this is where I expect the submitter to look into the issue, make sure that their patch is still relevant, and if it is, to resubmit to put it back at the top of the list.
Yet another factor is that I don't always bother to send an explanation if I think someone will be able to figure out for themselves why their patch was rejected. This can be because they are an experienced developer, or because they started the mail with "I know this is an ugly hack", or because of some obvious problem like not in diff -u format. In such cases, if people can't figure it out they should ask and then I will gladly provide the explanation; but if they can figure it out by themselves then I've saved the time that it would have taken to write the explanation.
And of course sometimes I hit 'd' on the wrong line and a patch disappears without a trace...
The real problem I think is that there is no external way to determine the pending/rejected/dropped status of a patch, and I understand this can be frustrating. This is where a tracking system could help; but IMO it will be quite a bit of work to implement something transparent enough that I don't have to spend more time on each patch that I do now.
On April 13, 2003 03:13 pm, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
The real problem I think is that there is no external way to determine the pending/rejected/dropped status of a patch, and I understand this can be frustrating. This is where a tracking system could help;
I'm not sure we really need such a fancy system. The process as you describe it is great, and it's what I'd do if I were in your place as well. But if you look at it, the only patches that are problematic are the ones that remain in the "pending" state too long. Unfortunately, no system can help there -- it is only you that knows if the patch is still pending, or got rejected. At that point, I don't see the advantage in going to another system to say "REJECTED" (and hopefully supply a reason), or simply press the Reply button to do the same thing. The only thing that I see at the moment that can bring a little improvement is if you can teach your mail client to deal with a few canned replies.
Hi,
On Sun, Apr 13, 2003 at 12:21:30PM -0400, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
On Sat, 12 Apr 2003, Andreas Mohr wrote:
P.S.: Alexandre, I'd REALLY like you to finally put a patch status tracking system in place. The number of people submitting patches for the second, third, bazillionth time is astonishing (I speak from my very own experience, too!). I really don't know how many very valuable Wine patches got lost due to not getting applied without any status reply whatsoever... (particularly the ones from "foreigners") Someone recently said (in WWN) that patch management was perfect or something to that extent. I better don't comment on that statement, you know my hot temper ;) OK, it's definitely not awful, but I guess it could be better.
First off, I don't think the current system is bad. Second, I was the one this in the WWN (so sue me :P). Any system that we would put in place would have to work with email just like the current one. Other suck big time, see the SF one. Once you notice that, you realize that the problem is not the system, but rather that Alexandre needs to reply to patches he rejects, wether through email/web based form/what have you.
Ah, it was you!! ;-)
I can imagine that a real patch tracking system might be problematic in some work overhead aspects, but a lot of people would probably feel more safe.
Don't get me wrong -- I've been multiple times at the rejecting end of this, and it's frustrating. But in retrospective, it's all for a better Wine, and I'd be hard pressed to produce a patch which got rejected by Alexandre, and which I still think should be applied.
Also, your assesment that 'very many valuable Wine patches got lost' is a gross exageration. In fact, please produce 3 such patches that got lost in the last year (heck, in the last 3 years for that matter). I think you'll have a hard time finding a single such patch in the last X years (choose X as you may) that match your description.
First, let's make sure people know that there's a difference between my "I really don't know how many very valuable Wine patches got lost" and what your mail made me say ;-)
Well, I just took Feb. 11 as some random date. Since that time, I've had 4 out of 9 of my patches rejected. Since we're speaking of rejecting: I'm sure you know the difference between iptable's REJECT and DROP target...
I'm not saying that all of my patches are necessarily "valuable", but this statistic accounts to a rejection rate of about 44%, which is slightly unacceptable (to put it a bit mildly ;). Other people seem to also have had some trouble.
BTW, I'm back to wine-devel now, in case you didn't notice ;)
(I went into "overload" mode few months ago and filtered all wine-devel mails away, due to a pretty busy semester and way too many OSS-related emails per day)
I'm currently not very involved in Wine development, since I'm currently busy writing a driver at http://acx100.sf.net </shameless ad>
Greetings,
Andreas Mohr
On Mon, 14 Apr 2003, Andreas Mohr wrote:
Well, I just took Feb. 11 as some random date. Since that time, I've had 4 out of 9 of my patches rejected. Since we're speaking of rejecting: I'm sure you know the difference between iptable's REJECT and DROP target...
Yes, it's just that you maintained that 'very many valuable Wine patches got lost'. Which kindda implies they got DROPed, not REJECTed.
I'm not saying that all of my patches are necessarily "valuable", but this statistic accounts to a rejection rate of about 44%, which is slightly unacceptable (to put it a bit mildly ;). Other people seem to also have had some trouble.
Well, no system will do anything for the rejection rate. The patches weren't ready for prime time. What system do you want to put in place that will rework your patches as per Alexandre's criteria? :)
All we can do is worry about those patched that get droped (i.e. without a notification from Alexandre). You are talking about things that can't (and shouldn't ) be fixed.
I'm currently not very involved in Wine development, since I'm currently busy writing a driver at http://acx100.sf.net
Cool! What's gotten into you?!? :)
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Alexandre Julliard -
Andreas Mohr -
Dimitrie O. Paun -
Dimitrie O. Paun