27 Oct
2021
27 Oct
'21
6:32 a.m.
One major issue with any patch or code change is regression testing.?
Any given change may fix a particular issue but what are the
ramifications for the entire system across all circumstances.
Though a change or fix may seem simple to integrate, the time is takes
to fully vet that fix could take weeks depending on the system.
On 10/27/2021 8:02 AM, Sijmen J. Mulder via cctalk wrote:
Peter Corlett via cctalk <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>:
On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 10:18:51AM +0200, Sijmen
J. Mulder via cctalk wrote:
[...]
'Even' trivial patches, not only
trivial patches. I can understand
rejecting something that will take real effort to review and merge.
It's especially frustrating when, after
having put in the work, projects
refuse even trivial patches for Solaris and derrivatives or sometimes even
BSDs because 'who uses that anyway'. (I include the patches in pkgsrc
instead.)
[...]
Anyway, this hypothetical patch submitter has apparently put in minimal
effort ("trivial patches") and now implicitly expects the project maintainer
to integrate it immediately, and then do the thankless task of maintaining
and testing it indefinitely on (multiple releases of) a closed-source
platform which is actively hostile to their work. For free, presumably.
This is a
rather harsh take on someone submitting a shell compatibility
fix, or a linker flag, or an autoconf check, etc. No one is asking for
'immediate' or 'indefinite' anything. It's perfectly fine to accept
compatibility patches and not commit to officially support that
platform.