[TYPO3-v4] Motivation for making patches or how to speed up the review process

[Jigal van Hemert]

Hi,

Problem:
--------

It's very demotivating if someone takes the trouble of writing a patch 
for an existing problem or a new feature and the RFC is not reviewed.

It's very demotivating if that person sees other RFCs get votes within 
hours or days after posting it to the core list.

Some time ago I heard strong rumours that the Association would hire 
someone to spend at least some time on reviewing the forgotten RFCs or 
at least getting someone to review those lingering patches. Until now 
nothing seems to happen.

Ideas for solutions which might help:
-------------------------------------

1. As suggested by Susanne, provide a step-by-step explanation how to 
reproduce the problem and how to test the solution.

2. Provide unit-tests so it becomes easier to test and review (Oliver 
did a presentation at T3CON09 [1], although the real How-to is missing 
from the slides)

3. A "REMINDER" should trigger the core devs to review an RFC or at 
least respond with remarks on what's missing, etc.

4. A "REMINDER #2" (or higher) should trigger someone higher (release 
manager?) to take action. This could be assigning a core dev to review 
it or ...

5. ...<insert your ideas here />...

Notes:
Points 3 and 4 might seem like a burden on core devs and the release 
manager. It will however motivate people to keep writing patches. It 
happens way too often that someone finds a bug or has an idea how to 
solve it; the standard response often is that he/she could write a patch 
and post it in the core list. If that person takes the trouble of making 
a patch (especially the first few are hard to produce) and nothing 
happens with it, how does that look to that first-time contributor? 
"Hmm... they don't seem to care"
It gets worse when the same person sees other patches being accepted 
within hours. "Hmm... it seems that patches from someone they know get 
votes very quickly" or "Well, only extJS and other shiny stuff gets 
accepted".
If more people are willing to write patches, bugs get fixed sooner, the 
quality of TYPO3 will improve, the number of open issues will decrease 
and probably more people will gain thorough knowledge of the TYPO3 core. 
  The work of the core devs will become easier in the long run.


[1] http://www.slideshare.net/oliverklee/unit-testing-for-the-typo3-4x-core

-- 
Jigal van Hemert.