Patched bug needs some TLC

[Mike A. Harris]

David Ludlow wrote:
> I logged bug 1542 on 10/5/04, over 7 months ago, and it's still in "New" 
> status, not even "Assigned".
> 
> I got some time and ambition recently, figured it out, and attached a 
> patch, and still no movement.  Am I using an obsolete bugzilla or is 
> there something I should be doing to make it to the radar screen?
> 
> The above isn't meant to be whining or a complaint; I appreciate the 
> volunteer effort involved by many, and I just feel like I'm missing 
> something!
> 
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1542

Since the majority of people working on X.Org are volunteers, there
is no official timeline of when a bug will get looked at, reviewed,
investigated, etc.

Bugs more or less get looked at as random volunteer developers have
time to look at them in their already busy daily schedule, or when
someone stumbles upon them while doing other work.

Performing sequential bug triage of hundreds of bug reports is
not particularly "fun", which is probably why there aren't a lot
of people volunteering to go through every bug in bugzilla
sequentially to see if there's anything valuable been attached
to random bug reports.

If an issue is in bugzilla, with proposed fixes, and has not
received any replies from anyone, it is possible that nobody
is familiar with the area of code, or perhaps those who are
familiar with the code area have heavy schedules currently, or
maybe haven't seen the bug at all.

Drawing conclusions from this - it's highly likely nobody has
looked at this bug report yet, or had anything to comment about
it to date (if they haven't already commented in bugzilla).

The best thing to do in cases like this is to write a nice friendly
email to xorg at freedesktop.org saying something like:

"Hi, I've filed a bug report about problem <foo>, and attached
a patch that fixes it.  If any of you nice friendly unpaid
volunteers out there could kindly spare a few moments to review
my patch and make comments about it, I'd greatly appreciate
that.  I'd like to get this into CVS soon if possible unless
anyone sees any problems with it.  Thanks in advance."

If that doesn't get a response, politely bring the topic up again
in a few days or a week.  Eventually someone is likely to respond
and discuss the issue, and probably check something into CVS.

Another option, is to become more involved with the project, and
sign up to become a member of X.Org, and request CVS priveledges,
and you can check sane things into CVS yourself, and help out
with the load of bugs sitting in bugzilla currently, perhaps even
volunteering to scan through them sequentially.  I must warn
however, that X.Org doesn't pay very well.  ;o)