Karl Fogel wrote:
> Paul, below is some concrete advice about patch management.
> Everything I'll say, though, essentially boils down to:
>
> "Try to see things from the point of view of those for whom the
> patches are being managed." :-)
ACK that far...
[ ... ]
> But the job of patch manager is about more than just finding the right
> issue. You also need to be following almost all dev list threads to
> some degree, so you can tell a) whether a patch should be filed at
> all, or b) if it has already effectively been recorded, because some
> issue points to the relevant mailing list thread already or whatever.
>
> And regarding (a): not all patches posted need to be recorded, at
> least not right away. For example, you filed issue #1391 regarding
> P. Marek's timestamp patch, but if you watch the (still active) dev
> list thread about this, you'll see that there is no consensus on the
> feature, let alone on this implementation of the feature. There is
> some consensus regarding a much simpler subset of the feature; look
> for recent posts by Ben Collins-Sussman, I don't remember the exact
> subject but it'll be obvious. Also, see issues #1256 and #1112 (hmmm,
> which may be dups of each other?).
Ough! Karl, don't you feel you are expecting too much from a single
person? The svn-dev list is a heavy-volume list. Following almost
all threads so close that you can see whether consensus was reached
implies that you read all the arguments very carefully.
> Anyway, since the thread is active, there is no danger of Marek's
> patch being accidentally forgotten about -- hence, the patch manager
> doesn't need to do anything yet, except watch the thread and get a
> sense of when some sort of closure or other recordable point is
> reached.
Often two arguments sounds the same but are really very different.
The oposite condition also often occures: two arguments sound
different but are really the same when you look closer on them.
So you need a very deep technical understanding _and_ you need
to follow discussions _very_ closesly in order to see whether a
consensus was reached. IMHO the dev-list have too much traffic
for a single person to follow almost all the threads _that_
carefully.
Maybe the time has come to split off the users-list from the dev-list?
Just my Eur0.02 :)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@subversion.tigris.org
Received on Mon Jul 7 11:39:42 2003