[xmonad] Re: darcs patch: XMonad.Core: rw recompilation

[Gwern Branwen]

On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 2:58 PM, Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:
> gwern0:
>> On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 1:50 PM,  <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > 1 patch for repository http://code.haskell.org/xmonad:
>> >
>> > Sat Apr 10 13:45:52 EDT 2010  gwern0 at gmail.com
>> >  * XMonad.Core: rw recompilation
>> >  This diverts the intermediate *.o *.hi files to /tmp, so they don't clutter up ~/.xmonad/
>>
>> Ping.
>>
>
> Rather than send an email for each patch that has been submitted but not
> applied, which risks spamming and annoying people, I would suggest a
> more constructive mechanism: write a single status report email with all
> the ones that you think are ready to go, and do that maybe once a month.
>
> This is a worthy task, and I'm glad you're taking it on, but adding more
> email to my inbox doesn't help me get to the work.
>
> -- Don

I did try that for a year or so. It got minimal results - persistent
backlogs, few comments or replies. So, I switched to individual
patches, which also let me set ultimatums for XMC; that has seemed to
work much better.

(I would like to run the numbers, but I don't know any way to ask
Darcs for when a patch was applied to a given repo, as opposed to when
a patch was recorded; with the former, I could check on things like
'did the average time before a patch was dealt with definitively
shrink or expand when gwern switched email styles?')

As I've suggested before: if you and Spencer are so overloaded as to
be unable to review modest patches given half a year, why not give a
third person the core commit bit? I wouldn't trust myself with the
core, but is there no one else? Joachim Breitner, for example, since
he's already patching Xmonad-core under his Debian maintainer hat.

-- 
gwern