Hackers,
Well, after a month the July CommitFest is officially closed. At this
point, we're operating with the defacto rule that commitfests shouldn't
last more than a month.
Because some patches are still being discussed, they've been moved over
automatically to the September commitfest. A much large number of
patches are now in "returned with feedback"; if your patch is in there,
probably hackers is waiting for some kind of response from you.
Lots of stuff was committed, too. 8.4 is looking very exciting.
Post-mortem things we've learned about the commitfest are:
1) It's hard to get anything done in June-July.
2) The number of patches is going to keep increasing with each
commitfest. As such, the patch list is going to get harder to deal
with. We now urgently need to start working on CF management software.
3) Round Robin Reviewers didn't really work this time, aside from
champion new reviewer Abhjit. For the most part, RRR who were assigned
patches did not review them for 2 weeks. Two areas where this concept
needs to be improved:a) we need to assign RRR to patches two days after the start of
commitfest, not a week later;b) there needs to be the expectation that RRR will start reviewing or
reject the assignment immediately.
4) We need to work better to train up new reviewers. Some major
committer(s) should have worked with Abhjit, Thomas and Martin
particularly on getting them to effectively review patches; instead,
committers just handled stuff *for* them for the most part, which isn't
growing our pool of reviewers.
5) Patch submitters need to understand that patch submission isn't
fire-and-forget. They need to check back, and respond to queries from
reviewers. Of course, a patch-tracker which automatically notified the
submitter would help.
6) Overall, I took a low-nag-factor approach to the first time as
commitfest manager. This does not seem to have been the best way; I'd
suggest for september that the manager make more frequent nags.
Finally: who wants to be CF Manager for September? I'm willing to do it
again, but maybe someone else should get a turn.
--Josh
