Humble request at Walter: Could you _please_ fix phobos already?

janderson askme at me.com
Mon Jul 23 22:54:20 PDT 2007


Walter Bright wrote:
> janderson wrote:
>> Maybe the community should just make a branch of Phobos 
>> (Phobos.Community).  Go though all the submissions to bugzilla and add 
>> them.
> 
> I'm going to do a little rant here, so please indulge me for a moment. 
> Many of the submitted patches are well done, and they aren't put in 
> phobos because I haven't gotten off of my lazy arse and put them in yet.
> 
> But some are of the form "I don't know how it works, here's a patch that 
> might work but I haven't tried it." Those kind of patches are not helpful.
> 
> A good patch has the following attributes:
> 
> 1) It's done based on a good understanding of how the module works and 
> how it should work.
> 
> 2) It's been tried and found to work. Saying it "seems" to work isn't 
> good enough, and leaves me with the thought that the engineering of the 
> patch will have to be completely redone.
> 
> 3) Unit tests are included to independently verify that it does, indeed, 
> work and solve the bug.
> 
> 4) The -cov switch was used to verify that all lines of the patch were 
> executed by the unit tests.
> 
> Do I consistently live up to this standard 100%? Nope, and shame on me 
> for not. And every time I don't, I get burned.

A good point.

Maybe the community could somehow help you find the better ones by 
voting/reviewing (using the attributes you just outlines).  Also ones 
that are not up to standard could me marked as so (by anyone), so either 
the original person or another can improve it.  I'm imagining each 
bug-fix being handed to Walter on a sliver spoon, reviewed and improved 
by many people.  Chances are people area more likely to improve their 
contributions if they know they are not up to scratch.

I guess its difficult to motivate people (or to find people who have 
time for that sort of thing).  One way to help this is to have good 
documentation on Bugzilia about how to contribute to the effort.

Another would be to have regular weekly positing of all the bugzilla bug 
(or perhaps the top 10) to this newsgroup to remind people to review and 
improve them. ie "Please review these top 10 Phobos bugs and improve 
them so Walter can take them off the list. ect..."

Just a thought.



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