Re: [Gnu-arch-users] why is Tom so slow these days?

[Andrew Suffield]

On Thu, Nov 06, 2003 at 04:05:06PM -0800, Tom Lord wrote:
> As much as we've speculated that arch is just about ideal for
> "hierarchical gatekeepers" modes of developement -- for the pattern of
> "trusted lieutenants" who do some of the work of integrating work from
> a tree-structure of contributors, the tla patch-flow tree right now is
> rather shallow: everyone just sends everything to me, in effect.
> 
> A _subset_ of the regular gnu-arch-users folks are certainly qualified
> to become (conservative, I hope) second-level gatekeepers -- to do
> some of the merging work I'm neglecting, presumably with the idea that
> I'll eventually add that to my GNU releases.
> 
> I wonder two things:
> 
>       ~ whether there are qualified people (more precisely, people
>           known to me to be qualified) interested in taking on that 
>           role, perhaps even making interim releases between my
>           periods of catching up

While I'm not going to offer to do this (I have enough[0] on my todo list
already), it may be interesting to note that I already do something
very similar.

I routinely merge anything that I classify as a "significant and safe
bug fix" into the Debian branch of tla, so long as I see it. However,
recently that latter part has been failing; while I'm fairly sure
people have made trivial bug fixes, I haven't been able to identify
them easily.

This is caused by two things:

 - this mailing list is getting crowded. Maybe it's time to split it
   up? I can imagine gnu-arch-patches@ working fairly well.

 - the savannah bug tracker is almost useless to me. It's impossible
   to change any of the severity or status fields, and there are
   plenty of bugs in there which have already been fixed, and aren't
   closed; there are also spurious bugs. I've even got one or two bugs
   that I filed myself which should have been closed by now, and I can't
   do anything about it.

   I presume it's somehow restricted via the savannah admin interface,
   and that's really inconvinient.


[0] I estimate around 7 man-years of stuff. No more long-term
    commitments for me.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ |
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