PRs are being closed for bogus reasons :-(

[Ian Lepore]

On Fri, 2018-06-01 at 15:53 +0100, rb at gid.co.uk wrote:
> > 
> > On 1 Jun 2018, at 15:41, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > > On Fri, Jun 1, 2018 at 8:10 AM, Bob Bishop <rb at gid.co.uk> wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > > 
> > > > On 31 May 2018, at 22:14, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > --------
> > > > In message 
> > > > , Warner Losh writes:
> > > > 
> > > > > 
> > > > > There's a problem with the PR database: there's too many bugs.
> > > > And despite the valiant efforts of a number of people over the
> > > > lifetime of the project, it has always had so many bugs that
> > > > everybody just threw their hands in the air and walked away.
> > > > 
> > > > The way to improve the situation is to fix PR's, not to complain
> > > > about PRs.
> > > Indeed. But look at the number of PRs with patches that are stuck in that state. Not pretty.
> > Over the years I've committed dozens of PRs that had patches in them. The sad truth is that only about 10-15% of them have comitable patches in them when submitted. And that number decays over time as things age in bugzilla. [etc]
> Sure. But the best a non-comitter can do is to supply a patch tested against HEAD. If the patch rots because it hasn’t been committed six months down the line it’s not my fault.
> 

The problem isn't bitrot, the problem is that many patches amount to
"here's a hack that works for me," and that isn't necessarily
committable. A committer typically has to do almost as much work to
figure out whether the patch is appropriate for all users on all arches
as they would have to do to develop a fix from scratch. Even if the
submitter has mad skills and submits a perfect patch, better than what
the committer would have done from scratch, the work to analyze
everything and decide whether that's the case still has to be done.

-- Ian