On Wed, 9 Apr 2008, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> Do other large projects accept patches 'ad hoc' like we do? FreeBSD? Linux?
> KDE?
The Linux procedure is documented at
http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/SubmittingPatches
Linux was forced into some structure by the SCO lawsuit circa 2004, in
that they track who patches came from more carefully now. But the process
of submission to the Linux kernel developer's mailing list is even less
organized than here; as stated in that document, they will drop patches
without comment whenever they please. However, they do have a person
designated "Trivial Patch Monkey" which is such a great title that you
have to forgive the rest of the problems in the process.
FreeBSD includes a program called send-pr just to submit "problem reports"
into their system which can include feature changes. You can get an idea
how sophisticated their tracking for bug patches is by looking at
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr-summary.cgi?query
KDE's process works similarly to here, e-mail based with specific people
assigned to track submissions to the various portions of the project:
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/other/developer-faq.html#q2.21
GNOME makes all submitters create a report in bugzilla and tracks from
there:
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeLove/SubmittingPatches
Apache also pushes everything through bugzilla:
http://httpd.apache.org/dev/patches.html
The interesting quote there is:
"Traditionally, patches have been submitted on the developer's mailing
list as well as through the bug database. Unfortunately, this has made it
hard to easily track the patches. And without being able to easily track
them, too many of them have been ignored. Patches must now be submitted
through the bug database..."
The thing that will obviously go away if this project were to switch to
such a model is that right now, there are lots of ideas that go by that
would never be submitted as patches like that. But Bruce snags them and
turns them into todo items and such rather than letting the idea just get
lost in the archives.
--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD