Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2002 17:04:00 -0800 From: Alfred Perlstein <bright@mu.org> To: Ian <freebsd@damnhippie.dyndns.org> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: I want to help Message-ID: <20020404010400.GH93885@elvis.mu.org> In-Reply-To: <B8D0F3EC.BBC5%freebsd@damnhippie.dyndns.org> References: <20020403204646.GF93885@elvis.mu.org> <B8D0F3EC.BBC5%freebsd@damnhippie.dyndns.org>
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* Ian <freebsd@damnhippie.dyndns.org> [020403 17:01] wrote: > > Could you (or someone) expand on this a bit more? "Bring up..." in what > sense? On which mailing list(s)? > > I recently ran into minor-ish problems with some tools and figured I'd > contribute by submitting PRs along with patches to fix the problems. In > each case I decided to start by seeing if there were any open PRs against > those tools already, so that if other problems needed fixing I could get > them all taken care of at once. > > What I found instead was that each of the problems I had found had already > been PR'd and patches were submitted with the PRs, so the problems and the > fixes have just been sitting there going stale for months. In one case I > found the exact same problem reported in two open PRs (months apart) with > different fixes available. > > I joined the bugbusters mailing list in hopes that would be a hotbed of > bug-fixing activity where this sort of thing could be brought up. Instead > it appears to be a pretty much inactive list. > > I've been a programmer for 25 years, and unlike many programmers, I actually > enjoy fixing bugs, making changes to existing code someone else wrote, > writing documentation, and other things that most programmers seem to find > distasteful. But I have no interest in doing work that's destined to be > completely ignored and unused. (I got enough of that doing contract work > for the U.S. government.) Sometimes a strongly worded: "this bug has had a perfectly viable fix sitting in GNATS for a month can someone _please_ take a look at it" what works even better is tacking onto a developer you know and mailing them personally. sometimes just seeing a message like that and 100% of the viewers are like, "well someone will commit that" and no one does. :) -- -Alfred Perlstein [alfred@freebsd.org] 'Instead of asking why a piece of software is using "1970s technology," start asking why software is ignoring 30 years of accumulated wisdom.' Tax deductible donations for FreeBSD: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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