[Python-Dev] lost patches

[Brett Cannon]

On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 07:11, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen <at> xemacs.org> writes:
>>
>> There *is* a process problem, though I don't claim to have an idea how
>> to solve it.  Some developers (especially well-known is Martin van
>> Loewis) are trying to address this with the "one committer's review
>> for five reviews" offer, but maybe there are even better ways to do
>> it.  However, this is a *different problem* from "lost patches", which
>> many projects do suffer from, and shouldn't be called by that name,
>> which is insulting to the Python committers.
>
> I don't think it is insulting (I say that as a young Python committer), and I do
> think it is fair to call them "lost patches". Perhaps not after four months, but
> when a good patch hasn't been committed after two years, it is potentially lost
> because the code base has changed a lot since that and 1) the patch doesn't
> apply completely anymore 2) it must be reassessed whether the patch is
> good/useful/necessary with respect to the current code base, which can be tricky.
>

It is unfortunate when a good patch for a real issue doesn't get
applied during the current development cycle. But I honestly think, in
general, the important ones do get looked at and handled. Yes, some
slip through the cracks, but overall I think we do pretty well.

> As for reviews, we don't seem to use Rietveld a lot, although it offers a nice
> interface for comfortably viewing changes, and possibly commenting them. The
> overhead of having to open a separate issue in Rietveld and upload the patch
> there is a bit annoying, though.

My hope is that some day we get around to fixing this and getting a
code review application tied into the issue workflow so it is no more
than pressing a button.

-Brett