Re: Patch status for a non-developer

["Diego Escalante Urrelo" <diegoe gnome org>]

Hey

On 7/29/08, Andrew Conkling <andrew conkling gmail com> wrote:
> I'm trying to coordinate with the developers of Banshee, but I suppose this
> is a good general question:
>
> For a non-developer (like me) interested in contributing to bugs and the
> inevitable patches, is there a status I can slap on a patch to say, "I've
> checked this out and, at the very least, it does what it says it does [but I
> can't speak to its elegance, style, or other code-specific things]"?
>
> Any advice would be most appreciated; reviewing patches is, at least for
> Banshee, a common bottleneck and can be frustrating for developers and
> contributors.
>

Supposedly this is one of the reasons for the PatchSquad[0], there's a
mailing list[1] (still with 0 mails) and a wiki.

I've been doing something similar for GTK+[2]. Rob Bradford and I were
supposed to bootstrap it in GUADEC but didn't have the time to chat
about it.
Right now I can comment you based on my experience with the GTK+
patches that the hard work is only getting developers to review the
patches. I can advice you the following concretely:
 - Do a list of patches, mostly simple fixes
 - Group those patches like: small, ready to commit, decision needed, etc.
 - Try with small patches first so the patch queue flush is more evident.

Now, it's a good time to do a call for arms :). Is anyone else
interested in starting the patchsquad for real? I mean, start to maybe
do IRC meetings and cleaning modules, etc.
A good first task would be to pick modules from the module list in the
wiki (mostly Vincent modules) and try -say- 5 patches and get together
in IRC to try to come up with a common workflow and format to present
our work.

:)

0 - http://live.gnome.org/PatchSquad
1 - http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/patchsquad-list
2 - http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2008-July/msg00239.html