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

[Francois Suter]

Hi Jigal,

> 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.

I fully understand your point of view. As Steffen already said, this is 
unfortunately not a new situation, but it's true that we are very few 
active core team members currently and that doesn't help (plus some of 
us are concentrating on specific tasks, like Benni on the release of 
4.4, myself on the documentation, etc., which leaves us very little for 
"day to day" patches).

> 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.

I'm not privy to what is discussed there, but I wouldn't believe such a 
rumor.

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

That definitely helps the most.

> 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)

That helps too, but it is nowhere near enough to waive patches through. 
Some patches are pretty. Some look very simple, but experience has shown 
that some may have far-reaching consequences. It's often not easy to 
judge whether a given patch can have consequences. This is especially 
with patches that touch on versioning, localization and things like 
TCEmain in general.

> 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 ...

As was already mentioned, we are all volunteers, so there's no forcing 
anyone.

It is important to keep the faith and continue sending reminders. 
Eventually the patch will go through.

I think I already said that elsewhere, but rest assured that we are 
fully conscious of these issues and trying to improve on them, but it's 
not as simple as it might seem.

Cheers

-- 

Francois Suter
Cobweb Development Sarl - http://www.cobweb.ch