Patch Piloting: how much of the extra mile do you go?

[Dan Chen]

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 12:00, Daniel Holbach <daniel.holbach at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> When I did my shift last week I noticed that a couple of merge proposals
> had their last comment saying "Would you mind forwarding the patch to
> Debian/Upstream?" with no activity since. I guess many of us check the
> bug or merge proposal later on again and dismiss it as something that
> was already looked at. The problem is obvious: if the contributor has no
> interest in doing this (or does not know how), it might sit there for a
> very long time.

I've always approached reviewing (and/or sponsoring) as taking on any
additional burden, because I interpret reviewing to mean "gathering as
many contributors to FOSS as possible." Once the bug report is filed,
hopefully with a patch (if not, I generate the patch), I use
submittodebian as necessary.

>  * It would be nice if submitting a fix would be easy.

Because I have sponsoring privileges, I interpret the above as "make
it as simple as possible for a FOSS contributor"...

>  * What can we do to improve things?

For those with sponsoring privileges, it helps to have a standard.
Thanks for initiating this conversation.

Cheers,
-Dan