[Psi-Devel] The way forward

[textshell-I1QKlO at neutronstar.dyndns.org]

On Mon, Mar 09, 2009 at 02:17:17PM -0400, Hal Rottenberg wrote:
> I think it is key that all the patches eventually make it to one place.
>  This is the only way to guarantee things aren't missed by accident.  In the
> past, I've said this place needs to be Flyspray.  Maybe that should be git
> now?

I think git is not suitable for patch management. Git is for bit chunks of
work that will likely go into mainline together.

For contributed patch management i think a good issue tracker is still the
right way. I don't think we are missing tools here.

I think it's more of a process (0.13-dev went in feature freeze and then
didn't get pushed all the way through, for example) and manpower thing. 

And it's a bit of a problem with the patches too. If i need to dig into
tons of psi code the review a patch, because it comes without any hint why
the changes are needed, i can basicly just threat it like a "i think this
codepath is buggy" note and need to basicly redevelop the whole patch, some
good notes with the patch can make review trivial in many cases, sadly most submitters
contributers don't do that and then even a simple patch can take quite some
time to review. And i think we need to do *real*review* on external
patches, not just "uh, looks like it doesn't break".

But mind, i'm not saying all pending patches are bad. Some are rightfully
big (plugins (not quite a patch, but still), webkit chat dialog, lots of
others), and some of the contributers are also very nice to work with.
And i didn't have much time for psi recently, but i hope that's going to
change, but as always there's always something that just comes up and takes
time.

 - Martin H.