I fail to see how ownership by a person would help in applying patches more consistently. Having a 'sponsoring committer' might help to get patches applied. Then again, I think you are looking at the symptom, not the cause. <imho>The fact no sponsoring committers exist for certain patches might tell more about the patch than the willingness of the committers. I wouldn't like to see patches being committed just for cleaning out that list, but because they solve a genuine problem or add something original to the codebase. Above all, code needs a shepherding community, and we have already seen what happens if some parts of the (elaborate) Cocoon codebase are less well tended due to being one-man-shows.</imho>
</Steven>
But it's obvious we have a more or less bad bug handling. Most of the bugs are not even ASSIGNED, so nobody can really see if it's only a bug report of a user or a confirmed bug. Why don't we accept or reject a bug within a month at the latest.
And the patches? Why aren't they applied or rejected within ... hmmm ... let's say a half year at the latest? Of course it's not important that anybody owns the bug, but they should not be ignored. At the moment 40 bugs are older than a half year (bug number 15.000 and lower).
Furthermore the informations on a bug like severity are not use as possible and as they should. We have 4 blocker and 5 critical bugs - shouldn't this prevent us from releasing new versions?
Joerg
