Re: Long time outdated jemalloc

On Sat, Jul 20, 2024 at 1:59 AM cglogic <cglogic@protonmail.com> wrote:

> Hello FreeBSD community,
>
> After Jason Evans stepped aside from maintaining jemalloc in FreeBSD,
> it's not updating in time anymore.
> Version 5.3.0 was released May 6, 2022 and FreeBSD still not imported it
> into the tree.
>
> There is a pending review https://reviews.freebsd.org/D41421 from Aug 11,
> 2023.
> I'm successfully running FreeBSD/amd64 system with D41421 applied for 8
> months, as well as many other people.
>
> Can it be reviewed and committed to CURRENT?
> Or, if there is no committers willing to do it, can commit bit be given to
> submitter or another person willing to do this?
>
> It's very disappointing when users spend their time to fill such gaps and
> their efforts just ignored by the developers.
> Every year FreeBSD Community Survey asking about user experience in
> contributing to FreeBSD.
> Here you can see an example of such contributing.
>
>
First, thank you for being persistent and continuing to bring it up. It's
important to do that to make sure this (and your many other) contribution
doesn't fall on the floor.

And to be fair, we're only 3 months since the last update. Still, quite a
bit longer than you should have to wait, but not nearly the year the
original date suggests.

And this is a perfect storm of "how the project is bad at accepting
contributions":
(1) The original submission was close to the 14 branch creation time. This
meant that we weren't well prepared to look at it since it is such an
invasive change (at least on its surface). It also slowed the initial
response...
(2) There was a number of back and forth requests for changes, which took
time to sort out...
(3) The size of this is huge, well beyond the capacity of Phabricator to
review accurately...
(4) It's a vendor import. That means we can't just drop the Phabricator
review into the tree...
(5) It's phabricator: this is a great tool for developers, but we have a
terrible track record of using it for intake from new contributors. We
don't have any oversight at all over this tool, at there's at best tepid
and luke warm attempts to look for drop balls.

All of these things are a terrible experience. I can only apologize. These
days, we might steer this towards github, but the 'vendor import' means you
really need someone on the inside, or you need to be on the inside to make
that work.

So, how to move forward? Well, I'd like to propose the following:
(1) submit all the other Phabricator reviews you have open (they are mostly
good, or close to good) to github. Github is being actively managed and
will make it faster to get things it. It's a much better tool for new
contributors (and even frequent contributors of smallish things).
(2) I should do an vendor import of 5.3.0 from github, and do the merge to
a branch and push that to github. You can then layer on your changes and
those can be reviewed more closely as a pull request against the branch I
push. I suspect that most of the issues are sorted out already
(3) I'll land it via that route...

And, if the sum of the other pull requests and this are good (and I suspect
they will be), then we can talk about commit bits and such.

It's experiences like this which is why I'm trying to stand up github pull
requests as a reliable way to get things and and the best place to send
people...

Thanks again for persisting, and also for expressing this criticism that we
(hopefully) can use to make it better.

Warner