[wp-hackers] Recommendations for trac patches?

[Chris Jean]

It would greatly help me and people like me (who submit patches to core) 
if a definitive guide on how to submit patches is created. When I 
submitted my first patch, I did it by following the guidelines in the 
Codex. Those are mostly geared towards people reporting issues with a 
little tacked on for people providing patches. It would seem to me that 
people might provide more patches if they knew exactly what was expected 
of them, their trac ticket, and their patches. I've submitted numerous 
patches, and I still feel that I have a loose at best understanding of 
what I should do.

Adding keywords is a mysterious thing with no clear rules or 
expectations on how they should be used. I've always felt that at most 
as the provider of the patch, I should provide has-patch. This is due to 
the fact that I have no idea what a core dev considers worthy of 
additional keywords. The description for commit specifies a "trusted 
member". Who is a trusted member? Do I count as one yet? I have no idea. 
To me, the has-patch keyword denotes that I, or the person who submitted 
the patch, has tested the patch against the build cited inside the diff 
and believes that the patch should be added to core. If the patch 
submitter did not believe this, why would they submit the patch? 
Apparently I'm wrong on this thinking, so being clearer in the docs 
could easily produce tickets more in line with what the core devs desire.

A guide that details what the keywords are, when to use specific 
keywords, how to select the proper component, etc would be greatly 
useful. If a solid example of what the core team desires in a patch 
ticket is provided, that would be even better. I volunteer to work on 
adding such best pratices info to the Codex, but first I need to know 
the details on the best practices as I obviously don't right now.

As a final note, I don't want to start CCing different devs just to get 
attention. I want to find out what is missing from my submissions that 
is causing them to be ignored. I'm sure that others have this issue and, 
like I have in the past, believe that this is just the way trac is: 
submit a patch and forget about it since it may never be noticed.

Chris Jean
http://gaarai.com/
@chrisjean


On 02/03/2010 04:03 PM, Peter Westwood wrote:
> FYI The things that get my attention quickest are:
>
> 1) Patches mentioned when I'm in IRC - This is a short cut but you 
> still need to do (3)
> 2) Patches marked up with relevant keywords in priority order - commit 
> > tested > has-patch
> 3) Patches which have clear information in the ticket about: The bug, 
> The fix, The test cases
> 4) Patches on tickets to which I am CC'd - These end up in a separate 
> mail folder from the mail wp-trac mail deluge!
>
> In general when I have the free time I start from here - 
> https://core.trac.wordpress.org/report/6
>
> I hope that helps
>
> Cheers