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PRs containing patches
Around a third of all open PRs [http://people.freebsd.org/~linimon/studies/prs/prs_for_tag_patch.html contain the 'patch' tag], indicating they contain a patch of some form. From an end-users point of view, these may well be the most frustrating type of ignored PR, for several reasons:
- A user has actually gone to the effort of diagnosing the problem and coding a solution or workaround, only to have it ignored.
- Users may feel frustrated as they percieve the actual process of committing the patch to be simple, compared with the effort of creating the patch.
- Patches can quickly become outdated and unapplyable in their current form, and may regularly need to be updated by the submitter and/or other people wanting the functionality.
For these reasons and more, it would be good if we could go through PRs which contain the [patch] tag and decide if they are ready to be committed as-is. If so, they could be added to the list of recommended PRs in ~linimon/public_html/recommended.prs or committed straight away, or if the patch is deemed unsuitable then feedback should be added to the PR to explain why so, to give other people a clue as to how to get the patch into a committable shape.
Possible criteria to decide if it committable include:
- Is the corrected behaviour actually a bug (or, do we want the functionality, for improvement requests)?
- Does it fix the bug in question?
- Does it apply cleanly to -HEAD?
- Does it follow style(9), or can it be made to easily?
There are a lot of patches in PRs that do fix real bugs, and do fit the above criteria for being ready to commit. Let's get some of them pushed into the tree!