[Python-Dev] My patches

[Paul Moore]

2008/10/30 A.M. Kuchling <amk at amk.ca>:
> On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 11:04:42AM +0000, Barry Warsaw wrote:
>> One of the reasons why I'm very keen on us moving to a distributed version
>> control system is to help break the logjam on core developers.  True, your
>> code will still not be able to land in the "official" branch without core
>> developer intervention, but you will be able to share your code, fixes,
>> branches with everyone in a much more live way than patches in a tracker.
>
> I don't see how a DVCS will fix anything.  The bottleneck is in
> assessing patches for inclusion in the master tree; not enough people
> are doing that.  We'd just end up with lots of proposed branches
> waiting to be merged, instead of patches to be applied.

Agreed. There are lots of patches around, but not enough core dev
man-hours to review and apply them. As just adding extra people as
core devs isn't going to work (I don't believe it's *hard* to become a
core dev at the moment, it just needs a level of commitment that many
people can't offer), and as adding hours to the day isn't possible
(hmm, Guido - about that time machine?) I think the best way of
helping is with patch triage.

More people trawling the trackers and reviewing existing patches might
free up core dev time for looking at the more subtle stuff, as long as
(1) core devs could be happy to accept "this is OK, commit it"
comments from non-core devs, and/or (2) it's easy to locate stuff to
review, and just as importantly stuff which has been reviewed and is
"ready to go".

Question - is there anything Roundup can do to help triage? Extra
status or keyword values ("has patch", "ready to go", ...)? More
canned searches ("Show Open" and "Show Unassigned" aren't a lot of
help)? Custom reports (summaries by type)? Or are such things there
and simply not publicised enough?

I just did a quick experiment, checking for trivial documentation
patches I could review, and some things became obvious:

1. There is no way of telling which issues have a patch.
2. Some patches marked as "documentation" are doc fixes, others seem
to be issues where it has been decided that the behaviour is correct
as is, but needs to be documented. Fair enough, but it's much harder
to assess the latter, and there's no way of just grabbing the former
(for example, to spend a spare 30 minutes reviewing simple stuff).
3. There's nothing obvious I can do to move an issue forward. Sure, I
can make a comment, but that's about it. I'd like something that stood
a bit more chance of getting noticed (like a status change, or maybe a
list of people who think this is good to apply, which I can add myself
to).

All of which boil down to (1) quickly finding stuff I can deal with,
and (2) feeling like what I do has an effect.

Hmm, I've spent more time on this than I should have, and it's gone
way off topic. Is there anywhere better to discuss it?

Paul.