Re: “please send a patch”

It seems that Matthew Palmer misread my blog post as a complaint against developers asking for patches in exchange of pet feature requests. He really should pay more attention, since I gave “pet feature requests” as an example of case where it would be appropriate to ask for a patch:

Of course, there are cases where it’s perfectly reasonable to ask for a patch: when the task is expected to take hours, or when the result is of limited interest to everybody except the demander.

But even then, it’s not clear. This morning I got an email from a someone involved in PHP packages maintenance, who said that Bugs Search @ UDD was a great tool, but that he would love to have a way to list all bugs affecting packages with the implemented-in::php debtag.
To produce a working patch for this would probably take him at least an hour. You need to set up a copy of the CGI on alioth, understand the DB structure, dig into the code, etc. If you don’t understand SQL and Ruby, it could be a really difficult process. Also, it’s probably quite uninteresting for him to do that, since he is unlikely to stick around developing UDD.
Instead, it didn’t take me more than 5 minutes to produce a one-liner.
The net result for Debian in that case? 55 minutes saved by a developer.

Update:
Torsten Werner wrote an angry reply to my post. It’s true that yesterday’s episode triggered my blog post, because I felt quite frustrated to have to provide a patch for something that simple, and would have preferred to use the time for a Debian task where I would be more efficient. But I was not particularly angry at that episode, since that’s something I’ve seen on several occasions. That’s also why I did not mention any team in particular.
The feature request I was making was reasonable, and cannot really be considered a pet feature request (though I might be biased with my QA hat on): mentionning in the dak templates used for bug closure that packages removed from Debian can still be found on snapshot.d.o. The fact that he thinks that addressing this himself turns him into a slave raises interesting questions.

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