Jonathan Gordon wrote:
you're putting words in my mouth... and well thats another point,
patches arent outright rejected untill they come up for discussion,
there are left to rot in the tracker.
Which word? You said we need to bring them back to "sane" standards. By
definition of the words themselves, that means the current standards
must be insane. And plenty of patches get rejected without discussion.
It's only patches in the mid-range that really get discussed. Patches
that are good enough tend to have someone confident enough that it's
done well, done right, and doesn't break existing behaviour that they
sure it improves the user experience *for everyone* and so they commit
it, and weather a few complaints. You're never gonna get everyone to
agree, so it will *always* be an issue of your confidence. If the fact
that a lot of people are complaining about it discourages you, you're
probably not sure enough of the feature in the first place, I think.
If we want to be democratic how can they be separate issues? Debate is
fine (fun even), what we have in IRC after a contentious commit is not
debate. what we have before a commit is not debate.
Does what we have, before or after, stop you from committing? It's not a
democracy, otherwise we'd vote on each feature and be done with it. So I
don't get where this "if we want to be democratic" point even comes in.
People complain. You listen to them. You try to decide if they have
valid complaints or not. If there are valid issues, you attempt to fix
or resolve as many as possible. You decide then if the feature is
something you think honestly betters the project and then you move
forward with it, or drop it. The weight is still on you as the feature
author to make the decision, and to accept any consequences of the decision.
We have a very high level of patch rot which is the same thing (some
of the time), and yes reversions are something which is almost never
done which is a very nice thing.
We have a high level of patch rot because people put together half-assed
patches and as soon as they work for unsupported builds, they don't try
to address the problems. Even WANTED features usually rot because the
author doesn't care enough to fix the problems with it. So it's not the
same thing as rejection if we don't immediately snatch up buggy patches
and commit them.
