Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > What we really need is to have in place an efficient and effective
 > procedures for patch review and application.  Without that, patches
 > will collect dust on gitorious as they will in the archives of this or
 > another mailing list.

No, what is really needed is "all of the above".  Patch pilots[1] are
needed, or gitorius-like facilities will provide a high-tech way for
patches to collect barnacles.  A facility to make it easy to see that
patches have not been addressed (triage, comment) is necessary, or
patches will fall through the cracks more than necessary.  Reviewers
and committers are needed to actually process the patches.  A facility
that makes it The One Obvious Way To Do It ["it" == submit patches] is
necessary, or the facility for finding "orphan" patches won't be used
to submit patches.  And a facility to make it trivial (ie, electronic)
to submit a contribution assignment[2], so that submitted patches
won't languish for lack of an assignment/[3]

My suggestion is that while you're right, and Michal is right, and I'm
right, and ..., *your* best response here (as an Emacs maintainer) is
the same as always:

 patches [provision of needed facilities or reviewer effort] welcome!

Ie, just provide a list of needed facilities and encourage people to
provide them.  Just like ESR has done the work to port the repo to git.


Footnotes: 
[1]  Perhaps informally, as in current Emacs procedure.

[2]  And somewhat less trivial to submit a "future" assignment, so
that people won't complain that they didn't realize all their Emacs
code would automatically become FSF property upon integration into
Emacs.  Most want that of course, but there are jerks out there.
They'll complain anyway, but you want to be able to killfile them
after responding "you were warned in big red letters and it's not
default" exactly once.

[3]  If the user isn't a refusenik, nothing technological will help
with that.