Date: Sat, 23 May 1998 22:49:16 +0200 From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk> To: Studded <Studded@san.rr.com> Cc: ac199@hwcn.org, Ruslan Ermilov <ru@ucb.crimea.ua>, Niall Smart <njs3@doc.ic.ac.uk>, nick@foobar.org, freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Problem reports closed by Poul-Henning Kamp [was: Re: misc/6712] Message-ID: <18101.895956556@critter.freebsd.dk> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 23 May 1998 13:09:48 PDT." <35672D0C.94A89E8F@san.rr.com>
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In message <35672D0C.94A89E8F@san.rr.com>, Studded writes: > I agree to a certain extent. However I also tend to agree with some >others who have suggested that you're closing way too many PR's that >contain valuable info just because they haven't been looked at in a >while. I close PRs that have been fixed, or which have no hope of ever getting fixed in their current shape/form/contents/state. I don't close PRs if they seem to have any merit whatsoever. If I'm in doubt, I don't close a PR. And of course I make mistakes, I'm only human. >There are plenty of people who go looking for something to fix on >a sporadic basis, it would be nice if we had a list of things to point >them to. You mean like the several time published: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr-summary.cgi?state=s ? And before somebody cries "FOUL! that is for committers only" then please consider that many of them lack the patch to actually do the work. My current sweep through the PRs is an attempt to clean out all the dust, cobwebs and irrelevant PRs, so that the important onces are not lost in that noise. This is the reason why we have redefined the "suspended" state, and as I said, if a team of committers paid or unpaid will keep a new "stable" category cleaned out, I will have no problems adding such a state to GNATS, but if nobody is going to take at it, then we might as well just close the PR now, and get on with life. This all comes back to the issue which we have had since the 2.0 release branch was nailed down: Developers do what they think is fun, and they tend to do it in -current. Various groups of people yell and scream about what they want in the !-current branches, but since the developers are doing this for fun, they tend to think "Yeah Right, I'll look at it second thursday, next week between 12:00 and noon". As much as I agree with you all about "The Way The World Should Be", I am also very accutely aware that we do not at present have the manpower which makes that possible. "There is no glory in maintenance" and very little fun, so if we want somebody to do it, we have to pay them. So if you really want to see that level of support on the -stable branch, check out section 19.2.6.1 in the handbook: http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/handbook281.html#608 (But if you're going to expect tit-for-tat for your contribution, then please don't bother at all unless your contribution covers a majority of the cost of what you're asking for.) Once we get to the point where we can actually pay committers to pay attention to "!glorious" bits of the tree, this is an entirely different game, but that will take some people/companies that say "We'll donate N$" or even better "We'll donate N$/year" Poul-Henning PS: There is nothing which prevents a dedicated crew of committers from running diffs already now, they don't have to wait until T(release)-5d to do so. -- Poul-Henning Kamp FreeBSD coreteam member phk@FreeBSD.ORG "Real hackers run -current on their laptop." "ttyv0" -- What UNIX calls a $20K state-of-the-art, 3D, hi-res color terminal To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-bugs" in the body of the message
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