On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 04:00:16PM +0000, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> It's a bit hard to tell, because I was also doing a lot of patch review
> myself. The main coordination work so far has been (not all done by me):
Thanks for this instructive summary.
> I think we did more or less as you described this time, but maybe I've
> overlooked something.
>
> Since one of the goals for DEX is to build expertise within the team on "the
> right way" to handle these patches, I think it's important to discuss this
> with other members of the team. I also wanted to get a "second opinion"
> from a teammate before approaching the maintainer, because we are
> inexperienced with this process and still learning how it should work.
>
> The feedback I got on this list was very useful to me in continuing to
> process the patches (one of them I was able to drop entirely based on
> discussion, and not bother a maintainer at all).
That is useful to know as well. So, to refine my previous comment, what
I'm worried about is that we ask feedback about specific technical issue
on this list, no one replies because no one know that specific technical
area or packages, and we grow the feeling that "nobody cares". If we
monitor closely the various outstanding issues and we keep track of
which of them haven't received feedback yet, you're right that this is
not much of a problem.
> Once we had a team discussion about the patches, then I tried to contact the
> "right" people in each case. The advice from the group was useful here as
> well (e.g. email Martin Schulze directly). Here also, I involved other team
> members by CCing -derivatives, so that others could see what was going on,
> participate in the discussion if they had something to add, and pick up the
> conversation if I can't for some reason.
That worked quite well, AFAICT. I've just a suggestion to add, for the
next rounds. I've noticed a couple of mails which were To:-ed the
maintainer, Cc:-ed this list, and which were *referencing* some specific
bug reports, without Cc:-ing the bug report email address. In the future
I suggest to always Cc: the bug report, possibly to the -quiet address,
as that is the best way to avoid race conditions with other independent
activities which might target the same bug report.
> If we can't agree, need help, or don't know where to go, we can to go to
> -devel.
<snip>
> I'm a bit concerned about bikeshedding if we involve too many people early
> in the discussion who may have only opinions, and no role to play in solving
> the problem.
ACK. To reiterate / summarize, I was thinking about -devel as a venue
to identify the appropriate responsibles for a specific patch (in case
we fail to do it here). There are various trade-offs to be consider, but
as long as we monitor "missing answer" patches, we could start here.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Quando anche i santi ti voltano le spalle, | . |. I've fans everywhere
ti resta John Fante -- V. Capossela .......| ..: |.......... -- C. Adams
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