Making It Easier To Start Working On Bugzilla

[David Miller]

Jochen Wiedmann wrote on 12/20/05 2:36 AM:

> IMO, the Bugzilla developers have a clearly different attitude when 
> handling contributed patches than other Open Source projects. There may 
> be reasons for certain policies (quality, in particular), but to me, the 
> policies are sometimes overemphasized.

Yeah, it's mostly quality here...  there's a number of sites that run in 
production pretty close to the cvs tip (mozilla.org used to be one of 
them until we got short on manpower to keep on on it), so we usually try 
to do everything possible to avoid breaking cvs.

> At that point, I have two choices: First, I can tell the contributor 
> what I dislike. Second, I can fix the problems for myself and pull the 
> patch in. (Or, if a review is required, I can attach a modified version 
> of the patch.)
> 
>  From my experience, Bugzilla developers will *always* choose the first 
> alternative. I do not know, what the reasons are. It may be lack of 
> time, but my personal impression is, that accepting the patch will 
> sometimes be less work than reviewing a modified patch again.

There's a couple different ways to look at this.  I know we often expect 
the contributor to fix up their own patch, mostly with the goal of 
letting them get sole credit for the patch when it goes in.  Some of us 
feel like we'd be stealing the glory from the contributor if we just 
took over the patch and fixed it up after they contribute it.

On the other hand, the contributor might not have the patience or the 
time to fix it up, and might be happy to have us take it over and finish 
the job for them.

Then the question becomes, how do we tell which type of contributor it 
is?  Will he/she get offended if I fix the patch, or will they be happy 
I did it?

This is a really good topic to get into our contributor docs probably. 
"Tell us if you don't mind someone else taking over your patch and 
fixing it up" or something.  Or maybe people don't think that way and 
I'm just paranoid. :)

-- 
Dave Miller                                   http://www.justdave.net/
System Administrator, Mozilla Corporation      http://www.mozilla.com/
Project Leader, Bugzilla Bug Tracking System  http://www.bugzilla.org/