Re: Documentation generation patch

[Marcus Brinkmann]

At Tue, 11 May 2004 08:49:23 +0200,
Tomasz Gajewski wrote:
> I think there should be at least one of you who should take on himself
> a task of receiving incoming patches and approving or refusing
> them. It wouldn't have to be next working day. Even a few weeks for a
> response would be acceptable.

Realistically, there is currently only one, and I mean exactly one,
person who is in charge of the hurd-l4 repository, and that is me.

I am not on a power trip.  It's just that I wrote the bunch of it, and
nobody else has gotten a deep understanding of it yet.  Neal Walfield
also wrote a bunch of it (plus he has the deep understanding, in fact
is often the cause of deep understanding), and in fact some of what I
wrote is based on his earlier efforts.  But Neal is currently doing
something else, not Hurd/L4 hacking.

There are some other people, but they are either contributors like
you, or work on the ddf, something which I hope I don't need to be
involved with deeply.

I have all your mails in my folder, and they will receive attention
when I next start at looking at contributed patches.  For the last
weeks, I didn't do any Hurd/L4 hacking at all.  Before then, I was
deeply involved in writing libhurd-cap-server, which is a very
substantial and critical part of the system.  This was very time
consuming, and it required a great deal of concentration because of
its complexity.  This work is in CVS.

There are two ways to get things going.  The first one is to send a
reminder to the mailing list, and see if someone bites.  There are
several people who I know so well that I can judge what the status of
a patch is by their description of it.  So, if you get for example
Marco to look at a patch, and he is ok with it, then that allows me to
process it quicker because I only need to check for things that Marco
routinely misses :)

As Marco can also tell you, the best way to communicate with me is to
remind me of the things I have not addressed yet.  Sometimes I am
postponing simple issues, because my gut feeling is that they are not
simple at all and require deeper thought (which then is delayed), or
just because I don't want to be distracted from whatever else I am
doing.  If you feel that you have sent in something that doesn't
require much thought at all and can be resolved in a very quick
manner, your best bet is to mail me, remind me of the issue, and if
appropriate explain why you think that deciding immediately is less
work for me than to keep it in my head for later ;) I have many
faults, but I never, ever blamed anyone for sending me an email to
press me on a response if they felt I was a bottleneck.

Although in general I encourage all contributions, there should also
be a general understanding that I am not actively looking for "random"
contributions at this stage, exactly because I know that I can not
make any commitments or guarantees about response time.  Despite this,
some people don't mind, and keep contributing, and wait patiently for
when the next round of processing is done by me.  I am deeply grateful
for their patience.

I hope this clarifies matters a bit.

Thanks,
Marcus