[U-Boot-Users] u-boot patch submission process

[Haavard Skinnemoen]

On Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:25:26 +0100
Wolfgang Denk <wd at denx.de> wrote:

> Dear Haavard,
> 
> in message <20080211092625.4d09fe0b at siona> you wrote:
> >
> > But if Wolfgang doesn't wake up and apply a fix pretty soon, I guess
> > that might be exactly what's going to happen.
> 
> Please believe me, I'm not sleeping. I wish I was -  and  if  it  was
> only for 5 hours per night....

Sorry. I know you work very hard.

> > I'm starting to get seriously pissed off about this whole situation and
> > how it's been handled. Wolfgang, you can't with a straight face demand
> > that people always run the latest git snapshot WHEN IT DOESN'T EVEN
> > BUILD AND HAS BEEN THAT WAY FOR SEVERAL WEEKS!
> 
> I'm pissedoff with the current situation myself, but  I  cannot  work
> more  than  a certain number of hours per day, which unfortunately is
> not even close to 24. And I have to set some priorities.

I didn't mean to imply that you should work more. But I did mean to
complain about your priorities.

> Would it help if I apologized and explaine that I've been sick fro  a
> few  days,  and  that  this  lost ime just added to my backlog? No, I
> don;t want to do that and you don't want to hear that, all  you  want
> is some faster progress. So please do yourself and me a favour, don't
> increase the preassure on me and let me continue to work as fast as I
> can. Even if it's too slow.

Yes, that would indeed help (although no apology is needed). All I've
seen is that the tree has been broken, and you've been ignoring the
patches. A short note saying that you're sick or just doesn't have the
time to look at the patches would have helped a lot.

But to make things more confusing, I've seen you've applied other, less
important patches while the tree was broken. If you had taken the time
spent on one of those patches and applied one of the build fixes
instead (doesn't matter much which one at this point -- we can always
work out the details later), that would have helped even more.

As for the rate of progress, trying to pressure anyone to work faster
is not a good idea, I know that. But is there any way we can change the
process and move more work down the hierarchy? It seems to me you're
doing pretty thorough review on everything that goes into the tree, and
you're also sweeping up quite a few patches that the custodians didn't
pick up. This does not scale very well...one of the most important
responsibilities of a custodian is indeed review (or at least ensuring
that someone else does it.)

Again, sorry for using such harsh words. But I do think we should
discuss how to handle situations like this better in the future. Trying
to prevent it from happening at all is not productive -- we all make
mistakes -- but this means dealing with it in a timely manner is all
the more important. And it doesn't just happen in u-boot; the avr32
architecture broke three times during the Linux 2.6.25 merge window (as
did lots of other architectures). The difference is that the breakage
was fixed almost instantly when I or someone else complained about it.

But note that whenever I'm complaining about patches not being applied,
slow progress, or whatever, I'm really not complaining about _you_, I'm
complaining about the process.

Haavard