On Thu, 19 Sep 1996, Gordon W. Ross wrote:

> > From: Mike Long <mike.long@analog.com>
> > What those of us without CVS access do now is send in PRs, but it's
> > very discouraging to send in a bug fix and have it sit in the PR
> > database for many months without any apparent action.
> 
> How many of those PRs include fixes for the bug described?
> (And how many of those fixes are correct? 8^)

Well, I myself have been wondering how long the badsect(8) stuff
is going to sit in the PR list. (PRs misc/897, bin/994 and bin/2719).
These include fixes which, while admittedly not absolutely perfect
in every respect, at least get the thing running again. And they've
been there for a long time. (I have no idea if this is an isolated
example or if this is a common thing; I don't find the PR search
page off the NetBSD web page very conducive to browsing.)

Now, perhaps there are other reasons for those not going in yet.
I didn't notice that any of these mentioned much about testing.
Are there test requirements for these sorts of things? Do the folks
responsible for this particular PR have to compile it up and test
it themselves before it can go in? (If that's he case for the
majority of PRs, I can see how there would be a backlog.) Are they
willing to trust someone they don't know (say, me) to test this
fix, so that they don't have to do it themselves?

I bring this up not because I want to accuse anyone of not doing
a good job, but because I'm interested in finding out what we can
do to improve this situation, and in helping to improve it myself
if there's some stuff here someone who isn't a kernel hacker can
do. I hope this message can be taken in that spirit, rather than
as a contribution to the current brouhaha.

BTW, I have a marginally cleaner fix for badsect(8) that has been
tested that I will be happy to send-pr if that's going to help get
the badsect(8) fix into 1.2.

cjs

Curt Sampson    curt@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
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