Hi Folks,
Where is the best place to feed back patches and problem reports for
Samba these days? Should I be using "samba-patches@samba.org"? This
list? The samba-technical list?
The samba-bugs address bounces back an auto-response telling one to use
samba-patches for well-formed patches, but if the Jitterbug web
interface is to be believed then submissions to samba-patches seem to be
mostly just piling up unread. It is possible that someone is doing
something with the submissions, but if this is the case there doesn't
seem to be any feedback from the developers to encourage potential
contributors (of some 110 submissions over the last six months only four
have been flagged as "accepted" and only one has been
"rejected" - the
rest are still "incoming", and are mostly without followup messages).
A couple of weeks ago I submitted a modest patch
(http://samba.org/samba-patches?findid=106) to feedback some changes
that I'd made to "configure.in" in order to get
"configure" to properly
detect and support the HAVE_NETGROUP feature on a RedHat Linux system. I
don't expect accolades or Samba t-shirts to rain down on me for this
small contribution, but it would be useful to have some indication
whether it was acceptable or whether there was anything else that I
needed to do.
The samba-patches system looks like a nice idea - I like the idea of
having the submitted fixes in a public forum where they can be reviewed
by third parties, and the idea of encouraging contributors by giving a
little public recognition and allowing them to amass a "score" based
on
their contributions is nice. I think that it is only going to work if
someone does some editorial work and grades/sorts the contributions
though.
I don't claim to be a great developer, but if it would be helpful to
have a BOFH who would reject or junk some of the chaff ("this is not a
patch", "you need to change XYZ to make this portable",
"this is spam",
etc) and pass on the better stuff to someone else for consideration,
then I'd be happy to help out with swinging the axe. :-)
Regards,
--
Neil Hoggarth Departmental Computer Officer
<neil.hoggarth@physiol.ox.ac.uk> Laboratory of
Physiology
http://www.physiol.ox.ac.uk/~njh/ University of Oxford, UK
