From: Charles S. <ch...@st...> - 2014-01-09 18:07:52
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Allow me to be a bit of a Devil's Advocate... On 1/5/2014 7:18 AM, Schooner wrote: > I agree with Chris, the submissions system needs overhaul, or a system even. I respectfully disagree (see below). > I have had a patch languishing here > http://sourceforge.net/p/emc/feature-requests/ since last April > It may felt to be no good, but in common with most of the items on the > list, it is still shown as open and no-one has commented on it since its > initial submission. > > That does not inspire me to bother again and I am sure others have felt > the same. I completely agree with this. > I think you would find that there are a lot of private repos and patched > versions of Linuxcnc around, some of which hold some worthwhile changes, > but they are just being used privately and shared informally, because > there is no transparent system with any credibility in the centre to > receive and assess them. I believe the problem with patches is not that they have no one to review them, but they have no where to go. Anything but trivial and obvious fixes generally gets relegated into the "that could break things" category and are silently shunned until they are forgotten or otherwise go away. This leads to the splintering of LinuxCNC, since there is no forward-looking "official" branch the community can make significant contributions to. For examples, see the Arais Robot folks, the joints-axis branches, Michael and John's unified build code, the PREEMPT_RT patches that UBC grew out of, etc. I have said before and continue to feel that LinuxCNC needs a "Sid" or "Fedora" branch where it's OK to break things and put new code submissions. There they can be tested by the brave and cleaned up until they're ready to fold into a stable release. IMHO, without a change to where the patches go, no amount of patch herding will make a bit of difference. Again, I'm being Devil's Advocate here...PLEASE prove me wrong! :) -- Charles Steinkuehler ch...@st... |