[LLVMdev] Difficulties Getting a Bug Fix Committed

[Kaylor, Andrew]

Hi Michael,

I know it can be frustrating trying to get a patch reviewed and committed.  As you've seen waiting patiently doesn't generally work.  Persistent pinging usually does work, but sometimes not as well as one would hope.  In cases like this, you just have to be tenacious.

The specific thing I'd recommend is identifying the code owner and trying to contact him by various channels.  Start by CC'ing the code owner on your pings.  If that meets silence, maybe get on the LLVM IRC channel and see if you can find the code owner (or anyone else willing to review your patch) there.  If that doesn't work, trying e-mailing the code owner directly until you get some kind of response.

As far as I've been able to tell, the code owner will never ignore you on purpose.  Usually it's either that the code owner didn't notice your patch or the code owner did notice your patch and put it on his to-do list but is so hopelessly overwhelmed with other responsibilities that he hasn't gotten to it yet.  Direct and persistent contact generally resolves these last two cases.

Including up-to-date versions of your patch whenever possible (which I see you have done) is also an excellent practice.

Your particular patch has an additional problem in that it isn't immediately obvious who the JIT code owner is.  The CODE_OWNERS.TXT file might lead you to believe it's me, but it isn't.  I think it might be Evan Cheng (copied).  Or that may be a relatively orphaned part of the code, in which case you need to talk to Chris Lattner, who you will find is surprisingly responsive for someone with such broad responsibilities.

-Andy

-----Original Message-----
From: llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu [mailto:llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu] On Behalf Of Michael Muller
Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2012 7:38 AM
To: LLVM Developers Mail
Subject: [LLVMdev] Difficulties Getting a Bug Fix Committed

Hi all, 

I've been waiting for almost three months now to get a patch committed to LLVM that fixes what I consider to be a fairly significant bug in the JIT
(http://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=13678) but I've been having a hard time getting traction on it.  So far Duncan Sands is the only one who has given it any attention, but as of the last time I checked it still wasn't committed and the bug is still open.

Right now we ship our code with a patch to fix this in 3.1, I really don't want to have to do that again for 3.2.

I appreciate the difficulties in running a project as large as LLVM, and it looks like there are some recent structural changes that might decentralize some of the review/commit burden, but it doesn't speak well for your project when you have a bug with a fix and a unit test just ready to go that's not getting into the next release.

Can anyone help me move this forward?

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michaelMuller = mmuller at enduden.com | http://www.mindhog.net/~mmuller
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