a simple request: apply all outstanding patches.

[Rob Landley]

On Wednesday 17 May 2006 8:39 am, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Wed, 17 May 2006, Natanael Copa wrote:
> > That is probably also why he announced a feature freeze. Maybe we
> > could get a list of things/patches that are supposed to get into the
> > 1.2 release, so we can check if our earlier submitted patches are
> > forgotten or not? If we find anything missing on the list, we maybe
> > could ask for a re-evaluation if the patch should be included into
> > the 1.2, put on hold til after the 1.2 release or rejected.
>
> that sounds reasonable.  as i think about it, there's an interesting
> parallel with ethernet traffic analysis here.  people familiar with
> the ethernet technology know how CSMA/CD works.  if you have very
> little traffic, then almost all packets get through.
>
> as the traffic increases, you start getting the occasional collision,
> which forces a re-transmission.  as you increase the traffic, you keep
> getting more collisions, which cause more re-transmissions, which
> cause more collisions, etc., etc. and the whole system becomes
> unusable.
>
> i suspect patch submission works much the same way.  as long as there
> are few submissions, no problem.  but if you start to overwhelm the
> maintainer and patches start taking longer to be processed, submitters
> assume their patch got lost so they re-submit, which puts more work on
> the maintainer, which causes him to fall further behind, which
> inspires submitters to re-submit again ... you get the idea.

For a definition of irony, see:
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0201.3/1000.html

Yeah, I get the idea.  If other people would like to review and sign off on 
patches I'm all for it (means I can just scan the thing and see if I like the 
design, and assume the details are all ok because other people looked at it.)

But since busybox has always had multiple svn committers the logical thing to 
do is let established submitters with a high signal to noise ratio commit 
their stuff directly.  That also takes some load off of me, although I still 
read every patch that goes into the tree.  (Why do you think I _made_ 
http://busybox.net/downloads/patches/last25.html ?  And bumped it from 10 to 
25 because it was sometimes overflowing before I got to read it, when Mike or 
Bernhard really got going...)

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.