Re: knngist patch support

2010/2/11 Oleg Bartunov <oleg@sai.msu.su>:
> This is very disgraceful from my point of view and reflects real problem
> in scheduling of CF. The patch was submitted Nov 23 2009, discussed and
> reworked Nov 25. Long holidays in December-January, probably are reason why
> there were no any movement on reviewing the patch. People with

So...  I think the reason why there was no movement between November
25th and January 15th is because no CommitFest started between
November 25th and January 15th.  Had you submitted the patch on
November 14th, you would have gotten a lot more feedback in November;
I agree that we don't have a lot of formal documentation about the
CommitFest process, but I would think that much would be pretty clear,
but maybe not.  The reason there was no movement after January 15th is
because (1) I couldn't get anyone to volunteer to review it, except
Mark Cave-Ayland who didn't actually do so (or anyway didn't post
anything publicly), and (2) we were still working on rbtree.

Personally, I am a little irritated about the whole way this situation
has unfolded.  I devoted a substantial amount of time over my
Christmas vacation to patch review, and many of those patches went on
to be committed.  Some of the patches I reviewed were yours.  I did
not get paid one dime for any of that work.  I expressed candidly,
from the very beginning, that getting such a large patch done by the
end of this CommitFest would likely be difficult, especially given
that it had two precursor patches.  In exchange for giving you my
honest opinions about your patches two weeks before the scheduled
start of the CommitFest, over my Christmas vacation, and for free, I
got a long stream of complaints from you and others about how the
process is unfair, and as nearly zero help making the prerequisite
patches committable as it is possible for anyone to achieve.  It
regularly took 4-6 days for a new version of the patch to appear, and
as often as not questions in my reviews were ignored for days, if not
weeks.  It took a LOT of iterations before my performance concerns
were addressed; and I believe that process could have been done MUCH
more quickly.

Now, it is possible that as you are sitting there reading this email,
you are thinking to yourself "well, your feedback didn't actually make
that patch any better, so this whole thing is just pure
obstructionism."  I don't believe that's the case, but obviously I'm
biased and everyone is entitled to their own opinion.  What I can tell
you for sure is that all of my reviewing was done with the best of
motivations and in a sincere attempt to do the right thing.

You may be right that January 15th was a bad time to start a
CommitFest, although it's very unclear to me why that might be.  At
least in the US, the holidays are over long before January 15th, but
we had a very small crop of reviewers this time around, and a number
of them failed to review the patches they picked up, or did only a
very cursory review.  It might be mentioned that if you have concerns
about getting your own patches reviewed, you might want to think about
reviewing some patches by other people.  Of the 60 patches currently
in the 2010-01 CommitFest, I'm listed as a reviewer on 12 of them.
Needless to say, if someone else had volunteered to do some or all of
the review work on some of those patches, I would have had more time
to work on other patches.

...Robert