samba-patches

[Neil Hoggarth]

On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, Cole, Timothy D. wrote:

> Out of curiousity, who's responsible for culling/managing the samba-patches
> queue?  It's got a backlog of ~128 patches in "incoming" now, dating back to
> December 1999...

I don't know, but (speaking as an outsider who has tried to contribute
via samba-patches[1]) it appears to have been just setup and left to
rot.

This may be an inaccurate impression. It is quite possible that someone
is reading the submissions and doing something with them, and it's not
my intention to be critical of the Team (who I have no doubt are
completely swamped by correspondence and idiot questions). My concern,
however, is that there doesn't seem to be any feedback (positive or
negative) going back to patch contributors. This is going to put
potential helpers off, and leave them in limbo wondering about the
status of their submission.

The samba(7) page distributed with v2.0.7 suggests that patches and bug
reports ought to be sent to the samba at samba.org list, rather than
mentioning samba-patches. If the samba-patches system isn't being used
and maintained then it seems to me that it ought to be killed off. I
note that the autoresponder that now answers on the samba-bugs address
still points people in the direction of samba-patches rather than the
main list?

[1] http://samba.org/samba-patches?findid=106 - patch to configure.in
    to fix NIS netgroup support on my RedHat systems. Not incredibly
    important or earth shattering, I'd be the first to admit! But
    harnessing small incremental improvements from many contributors
    is supposed to be one of the magical strength of the free software
    development model, isn't it?

Regards,
-- 
Neil Hoggarth                                 Departmental Computer Officer
<neil.hoggarth at physiol.ox.ac.uk>                   Laboratory of Physiology
http://www.physiol.ox.ac.uk/~njh/                  University of Oxford, UK