Fwd: Community patches and bugfixes to Qt?

[Girish Ramakrishnan]

Knut Yrvin wrote:
> So the suggestion is to make it possible to submitt patches to Qt. This 
> has to be handles with the propper copyright assignment and a way of 
> handling privacy issues. Some companies will not revile what thy are 
> working on. There are individual Qt developers who will stay anonymous  
> for different reasons. It seems that we can cover all those concerns. 

Unless I misunderstood what you are saying, these issues are already
covered. Trolltech has a copyright assignment form that one can fill and
send in patches. I have personally done this; it's a bit tedious but
possible :).

The problem, I find, is not about sending in bug reports and patches,
which imo is already as painless as it can be. The problem is how the
bug reports and patches are processed.

Here's my list of suggestions on how Nokia can improve given its limited
resources for tracking patches coming from outside:

1. Task tracker needs a revamp - It needs a voting system, a commenting
mechanism, to upload user patches/attachments. More importantly, I need
a way to get notifications when the bug changes state.

2. A clear explanation for priorities given to bugs. For example, why is
219293 P4? I would have thought since it is a regression it would be
fixed asap (atleast, I think I reported it as a regression; the bug
report form doesn't seem to have mailed me back the bug I filed). The
point being, I would like to know why and it takes effort to find out
(it is surely possible to just ping Thiago and find out, of course).
Instead, provide the information upfront.

3. How are contributors acknowledged? Something as trivial as mentioning
it in the ChangeLog will be enough for me.

4. Without opening up Qt's unit tests completely, it seems to me that
every user patch will require lots of boring effort for the integrator.
A patch without unit tests has limited value.

Girish