X.Org: "A Wasteland of Unreviewedness"

After David Airlie brought up the new DDX driver API for the X.Org Server, a new discussion was born concerning the lack of patch review taking place for the X.Org Server.

David Airlie commented on the developers' mailing list about the lack of patch review for the new API patches, he wonders how he's "going to get the next 50 patches in at this rate some time this year." Alan Coopersmith then responded with how there seems to be a harder time overall in getting patch reviews done. Coopersmith says, "I've got no ideas how to fix this quickly, but we need to get it fixed."

The Oracle X.Org developer started a new mailing list thread about the lack of reviews. David Airlie went on to comment:

I've pretty much no idea how to deal with it sanely. We've moved to larger scale development model without a larger set of developers. The kernel isn't even as stringent wrt to reviews as xorg-devel is.

I'm guessing we'll probably have to have review swap parties or meetings or something insane like that to clear the backlog on occasions, it would be nice if patchwork could be kept up to date, but it would involve anyone handling patches to jump on and clean up the ones they've merged already.

I spent a major amount of my time either reviewing kernel patches, or persuading others to review other peoples patches so I don't have to, I'm not sure if we need some more tracking from Keith or others on what unreviewed stuff is outstanding and who best to direct it to, but again it involves a time commitment from someone and I've no idea who could afford it.

Like the input guys have a bit of crossover work, the build system stuff seems to be covered, but the rest of the server is a wasteland of unreviewedness.

Keith Packard's response to this wasteland of unreviewedness was, "Small changes seem to get reviewed pretty quickly; it's big changes that take actual thought that just aren't getting looked at quickly (if at all)."

Peter Hutterer's response is in favor of loosening the review requirements for xorg-server code. Alan Coopersmith also re-sent some patches that have been sent to the list before, but went un-reviewed, so if no one steps up to the plate, he's just going to be sending patches un-reviewed for merging.

But, on the plus side, the rants got Aaron Plattner of NVIDIA to review the first four patches of David Airlie's for the driver API changes, per this message.