[Python-Dev] lost patches (original) (raw)

Brett Cannon brett at python.org
Wed Dec 31 21:19:41 CET 2008

On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 07:11, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

Hi, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen xemacs.org> writes:

There is a process problem, though I don't claim to have an idea how to solve it. Some developers (especially well-known is Martin van Loewis) are trying to address this with the "one committer's review for five reviews" offer, but maybe there are even better ways to do it. However, this is a different problem from "lost patches", which many projects do suffer from, and shouldn't be called by that name, which is insulting to the Python committers. I don't think it is insulting (I say that as a young Python committer), and I do think it is fair to call them "lost patches". Perhaps not after four months, but when a good patch hasn't been committed after two years, it is potentially lost because the code base has changed a lot since that and 1) the patch doesn't apply completely anymore 2) it must be reassessed whether the patch is good/useful/necessary with respect to the current code base, which can be tricky.

It is unfortunate when a good patch for a real issue doesn't get applied during the current development cycle. But I honestly think, in general, the important ones do get looked at and handled. Yes, some slip through the cracks, but overall I think we do pretty well.

As for reviews, we don't seem to use Rietveld a lot, although it offers a nice interface for comfortably viewing changes, and possibly commenting them. The overhead of having to open a separate issue in Rietveld and upload the patch there is a bit annoying, though.

My hope is that some day we get around to fixing this and getting a code review application tied into the issue workflow so it is no more than pressing a button.

-Brett

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