Committing plugin patches without review

[Andrew John Hughes]

2009/8/26 Deepak Bhole <dbhole at redhat.com>:
> Hi,
>
> Until recently, Omair used to review a lot of my plugin patches. With
> him gone, plugin patches are ending up waiting for a really long time for
> approval. I was wondering if anyone objects to me just committing plugin
> fixes directly and sending an email about the commits? We can always
> back out the changes if someone finds an issue later.. and this way I
> don't have to maintain multiple trees on my end waiting for push..
>
> Thanks,
> Deepak
>

I agree, with the same provisions and logic I mentioned when the same
issue was raised with respect to Ed's patches:

  * Do the same mail posts as now, just don't wait for a response.
The convention we used in GNU Classpath was to prefix the subject with
FYI for patches that were to be committed, and RFC for those needed
comment.  Highlighting posts with patches for review by a visible
subject is generally a good idea when the list is used for other
traffic; this is the case with all the OpenJDK lists.
  * Any patches which change the build machinery (Makefile.am, etc.)
need review.

Ideally all patches would be reviewed, but there just isn't enough
people working on IcedTea for this to happen at present.  Obviously
build fixes are easy for people to test and comment on (and scream
about if they break things), but things that change optional features
like the plugin, Shark/Zero and ARM assembler are tested less
frequently and even fewer people know the inner workings.  I guess
that one or both of the new Red Hat interns (Jonathan VanAlten and Man
Wong) will be able to help out with time, but for now I think this
sounds like a reasonable course of action.

What do others think?

Also, the logic applied on the GCC lists is that minor fixes like
typos don't require review, and I think we should also applied the
same common sense criteria here.

Cheers,
-- 
Andrew :-)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

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