PR backlog (was: [RFC] Deprecation and removal of the drm2 driver)

[Mark Linimon]

Straying off-topic from the Subject line ...

On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 11:34:18AM -0400, Joe Maloney wrote:
> Technically since I was using PC-BSD, and was a committer for that
> project I had no real dire need to reach out to FreeBSD about the
> [wireless driver issue].  I was simply trying to help anyone else
> who might be encountering the same issue trying to use stock FreeBSD
> because it was a simple backport.  If my effort had turned out to be
> more fruitful I would have spent more time pursuing tickets, diffs,
> or whatever to get more things back-ported when I found them.

FreeBSD doesn't do well handling problem reports.  We've known it for
years but no one has come up with a magic solution yet.

We have volunteers willing to triage, but not enough committers willing
to suspend working on their own priorities to work through the backlog.
(It's understandable, really.)

And the backlog is astounding. (*)

I hesitate to even look, but ...

  kern   3270
  ports  2010
  bin    1607

The flow has decreased from where it was a few years ago -- this stat
says that 727 total new ones have come in this month.

We do slightly better turning over ports PRs -- due to the fact that
we attach a maintainer field to each port.  This doesn't completely
solve the problem, but it goes some distance.

Finally, the number of PRs with patches stands around 1021.  That is
particularly disappointing.

Well, it's too bad we weren't able to corral you into keeping working
on such things.  fwiw.

mcl

*: there are other categories but these constitute the majority (9485
in total).