From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Bernd Schmidt To: Joe Buck Cc: Subject: Re: patch tracking Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2001 03:07:00 -0000 Message-id: References: <200109141902.MAA15299@atrus.synopsys.com> X-SW-Source: 2001-09/msg00592.html On Fri, 14 Sep 2001, Joe Buck wrote: > The biggest problem facing GCC seems to be that patches aren't getting > reviewed. Even if I'm alone on this, let me just say that I also think there's a problem that patches are sometimes installed without sufficient review. Most people seem to think the constant breakage in the mainline is caused by insufficient testing and can be avoided by making the check-in criteria more painful and by resorting to automatic reversion if a patch turns out to be a dud. I'm of the opinion that sometime, patch review isn't done as well as it should be done (testing cannot prove correctness, but understanding can). The real risk for quality is not getting too few patches reviewed, it's getting too many patches installed. When I to review a bugfix patch, I try to make sure I fully understand the problem - that may involve debugging it myself. For larger patches, I still try to make sure that I understand it well enough so that I could quickly fix a bug in it if it gets installed. My opinioin is that if a patch I reviewed causes breakage, I made a serious mistake. In practice, this means that I don't get to review very many patches, since anything nontrivial takes hours to review, and there's a limited supply of those. Now people may claim that egcs was formed to address this bottleneck. I know how frustrating it can be not to have a patch reviewed; I was suffering from it for a long time as well. But we have a lot more contributors now than in 1997, and the number of experienced developers doesn't grow as quickly as the number of submissions. I don't think there's a good solution to this problem. Bernd