[Squeakfoundation]The Harvesting process and the BFAV

[Avi Bryant]

On Thursday, October 16, 2003, at 08:57 AM, Daniel Vainsencher wrote:

> This bottleneck is a result of our current structure, and won't go away
> by itself. It causes a situation where most patches meant for the 
> squeak
> image are ignored. I think this is not likely to last - either we
> balance this by removing the bottleneck, or contributors of patches 
> will
> balance it by posting less, an outcome I find regrettable.

Daniel,

I thought about this a little bit after our discussion on IRC.  I think 
one of the problems may be that for many patches, nobody feels a sense 
of personal responsibility to review it - they don't have a reason to 
care about that patch in particular rather than any of the hundreds of 
other patches, and likely they don't feel qualifed to - they don't 
think they know the subsystem that the patch is affecting well enough 
to give a useful opinion, etc.  And so they leave it for some fictional 
person who cares more, or is more qualified, and that person never 
comes.

I think that a push to get maintainers, or groups of maintainers, for 
the individual packages that make up the image may drastically improve 
the harvesting process.  We don't have to have a high barrier for 
maintainership - we want to ensure that lots of people to participate.  
But rather than encourage people to harvest fixes for the big, scary, 
messy image, why not encourage people to sign up as part of the 
maintainer group for a particular package that's of interest to them?  
That may add the extra specificity to trigger the sense of 
responsibility and qualification that is needed.

Thoughts?

Avi