Re: dicussion about patches ... ignoring patches make motivation to provide them fall
[Sven Luther]
> I am not saying that there needs to be an immediate response, or all
> patches need to be applied, but i believe that it is elementary
> politeness from a package maintainer, to at least aknowledge a patch
> or bug report when it is submitted.
I believe you are wrong. If you are right, then I am a very impolite
maintainer, as I have too many packages with too many bugs to look
after, so I do not manage to look at, nor acknowledge and comment on,
all the reported bugs against them, nor evaluate or commit the patches
provided. But I try my best, and fail to see why your assumption that
my behavior is impolite can in any way be correct.
> As for the bug reporter, and the patch submitter, being ignored
> for a long time when it is clear there is activity, is a proof
> that his work in searching for the bug, and in trying (even if
> clumsily) to find a patch is wasted time, and motivation to do so
> in the future will fall.
Well, I believe a bug reporter and patch submitter is better off if
she accepts the rewarding thoughts of a job well done, and not waste
time waiting for others to acknowledge it too. Working on free
software need to be self motivated, or one will end up very frustrated
as there is almost no external rewards.
All we can do is to make sure the bugs we find and the patches we
create are published and easy to find for the others that work on the
same package and find the same problem, and then work with the
upstream developers and distribution maintainers to get them to look
at the issue. Expecting this to happen by itself after submitting an
email without careful attention from the bug reporter or patch writer
is not going to cause anything but grief and frustration.
I've sent hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of patches to developers
and maintainers, and had lots of them ignored for a long time. There
is no point for me to accuse the developers and maintainers of
anything but having other priorities than me and having other things
to spend time on. The only way to try to get them to look at "my"
issue is by talking to them and attract their attention to the issue.
And as the lead developer of debian-edu, a contributing member of
debian-gis and debian-java, a long time contributor of
debian-installer and a vocal proponent of working in groups within
debian, I believe I have some experience to back my claim that my
approach work and lower the frustration level of working on free
software. Yes, it is still a bit frustrating to see patches submitted
to BTS being ignored for years, but at least I know that the
responsivility for this is on my end, not having spend enough time
working with the developer and maintainer to get him to give the task
enough priority. It does no good to try to blame anyone else but
myself for this, and I recommend the rest of you to place the blame
there as well. :)
Friendly,
--
Petter Reinholdtsen
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