Re: dicussion about patches ... ignoring patches make motivation to provide them fall
On 3/19/06, Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com> wrote:
>
> [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.
So what do you think about long-term ignored bug reports?
Do you think that should not be considered any issue/problem?
> > 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.
Why do claim that can be the only reason a patch is being ignored?
> 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. :)
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