[qutoes from multiple people here]

>> Are people supposed to volunteer, or do we get invited?

>> 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.

Yeah, I know.

> How many of those PRs include fixes for the bug described?

I've generated 63 PRs, as far as I can tell.  36 are now closed; of
these, maybe half included fixes; perhaps a couple went in directly,
but most of the fixes were, it appears, either ignored or used as
sample code for generation of the fix that went in.  (There are a
couple that were closed without anything going into the tree; I'm
ignoring those.)

Of the 27 still-open ones, three are really the same thing (2144, 2163,
2172); I should have sent the second two as updates to the first.  Of
the 25, I count 12 that include fixes, plus or minus a couple depending
on whether something like "Fix: either yank the .Xr line or coax
someone into writing the missing manpage" counts.

All of the ones that actually include patches are patches that I've
been running with since I generated the PR (except possibly 2718).  In
one case (#1709) I even sent out a note asking "why is this PR being
sat on"; it generated no response I could detect.  Now it's true that
prodding note was sent relatively recently, during a bit of the release
pressure...but the PR has been around for over 11 months.

> (And how many of those fixes are correct? 8^)

Define "correct". :-)  I run with them, or for the older ones, with
updated versions of them...therefore, they don't break anything _I_ do.
Where I've made small tweaks, I've tried to cohere to the style of the
surrounding code; for large ones, it's hard enough for me to write in
that style that I don't bother, figuring that it's not that hard to
filter the thing through indent.  If someone can give me an indent
configuration (or some other way using stuff that comes with NetBSD) to
generate NetBSD Standard Form, I'll even be willing to reformat the new
code.

> Perhaps you should ask for CVS access to the source tree [...]

At someone else's urging, I did.  The person I asked replied, cc to the
core list, saying "we're in the process of sorting out who gets access,
we'll get back to you".  That was months ago and I haven't heard
anything since.

Not that this bothers me per se; it took significant urging from the
someone else to get me to ask at all.  Just pointing out that asking
for commit access may not actually get you anything.

Unless, of course, there's someone left in core who has it in for me.
No names come to mind as candidates for such a person though... :-)

> Despite the thoughts of a few people, flaming the NetBSD developers
> is not the way to encourage their cooperation or get your source code
> into the tree.

True.  Unfortunately there are times when it appears to be the only way
to get anyone's attention.  I recall one outburst of my own, a while
ago....

					der Mouse

			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
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