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Date:      Thu, 31 May 2018 16:02:13 -0500
From:      Mark Linimon <linimon@lonesome.com>
To:        Dieter BSD <dieterbsd@gmail.com>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: PRs are being closed for bogus reasons :-(
Message-ID:  <20180531210212.GD24090@lonesome.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAA3ZYrDE1qN36jkg6bfTuUQL-Ko01UhVa=i%2BJ7t7AfN4hdBDMQ@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <CAA3ZYrDE1qN36jkg6bfTuUQL-Ko01UhVa=i%2BJ7t7AfN4hdBDMQ@mail.gmail.com>

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On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 01:31:32PM -0700, Dieter BSD wrote:
> Standard operating procedure at FreeBSD is:
> 
> Ignore PR for years.
> Close PR because it is "old".
> 
> Question: In what universe is this acceptable?

The sender of the messages in question was me.

I have tried for years to get more people to work on PRs.  I have
simply failed.  We have far too many PRs coming in vs. the number
of committers willing to do the work to get them in committable form;
or, work through the diagnosis.

So I've failed at the first part.

For the second part, if we're talking about things like FreeBSD 8 and
9, there are simply no committer who are going to work on them any more.
I doubt we have many committers that will look at any issue on 10,
either, as it approaches EOL.  We even have some who prefer to only
work on -current.

At some point it's simply realistic to say "this PR is never going
to be worked on".

I'd like to see us do a lot better at dealing with "PRs with patches" --
even more so than "can't get FreeBSD to run" -- but without some kind
of set of new volunteers willing to work on only such issues, it simply
isn't going to happen.

Please don't say "make the committers do xyz".  All discussions of that
form in the past have led nowhere.

Please don't say "well, just spend money on the problem".  Define who
will be spending money, who will be receving the money, and under what
terms they will continue to receive the money.  # closed per month?
That just makes people go for the easy ones.  But under what metric do
we keep paying them otherwise?

tl:dr; problem reports are an area where relying on volunteers is
admittedly insufficient, but no one has solved the "do it without
volunteers" problem.  And, this is not the first time we've had
this discussion on the mailing lists -- I hope someone comes up with
new, concrete, proposals, but I am not hopeful.

mcl



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