Re: Fixing Two Old PRs

[David Holland <dholland-bugs%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 07:37:49PM +0100, Dalibor Gudzic wrote:
 > Is there a time limit for old PRs upon which they sorta expire or
 > something?

No. See for example http://gnats.netbsd.org/698.

Don't forget however that there are some 4900 open PRs and the search
facilities thoroughly suck, so old ones frequently drop off the radar.
I've been trying to make sure this doesn't happen, or at least doesn't
happen so much, but I've gotten fairly seriously behind on it the past
six months or so.

Basically a PR that doesn't include a patch or other proposed fix
needs to attract the attention of someone who has some idea of what
might be wrong and how to diagnose it conclusively and/or fix it. The
more the reported symptoms suggest a hypothesis for what's wrong, the
more likely someone familiar with the offending code will be able to
formulate that hypothesis and take suitable steps. Unfortunately, it's
hard to describe what symptoms are suggestive... it takes a certain
amount of experience to recognize them.

USB- and ACPI-related PRs seem to be the most likely to hang around, I
think because both are complicated and fairly bodgy subsystems that
have to interact with a wide variety of frequently broken hardware,
and in the case of USB the code is also big jumble of leaky plumbing
that nobody really wants to take charge of.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost