> Uh well, i'd be happier if such review comments would have been made earlier
> in the CommitFest.
Well, as one of original reviewers of this patch, I feel a little bad
that I didn't consider these issues - the rules looked messy to me,
but I didn't consider that the whole approach might be wrong. But...
I have to admit I didn't look at this patch very hard. When I first
reviewed it on November 11th, it didn't even pass regression tests,
and you didn't submit a new version until December 26th, by which time
I had long since moved onto other things.
In the future, I think we should have an expectation that resubmits
within the same CommitFest should happen within a week, and that if no
revision is forthcoming within two weeks the patch is declared dead
(and the submitter can add it to the next CommitFest when they
resubmit). Don't think I'm picking on you, either: there was quite a
bit of it this CommitFest, and it's bad, because:
- reviewers are afraid to move on to new patches, because they don't
know when or if they'll suddenly be called upon to go re-review old
patches, and
- the commitfest takes forever, which is probably hard on the
committers as well as the reviewers, and
- when the FINAL commitfest takes this long, it creates an extremely
long window during which it's hard to get started on any new work for
8.5.
On the flip side, as I've said before, some of the big patches were
not reviewed until quite late. I think next time we should focus on
assigning reviewers to the big patches first (maybe two reviewers each
just to make sure we get good coverage...) and then review the smaller
patches afterwards. But that's a separate issue from how long the
submitter takes to respond to feedback once it's given.
...Robert