In his blog, Aaron wrote down some thoughts about how we might be able to improve our bug tracking system. As always a good read with some very valid points. But my opinion is, before we should think about any improvements, we (the maintainers) should improve our track record towards bug reports with patches.
I hoped that the “reports with patches” link on bugs.kde.org would improve the situation but it didn’t. KDE has 445 open bug reports with an attached patch at the moment. Some of them as old as April 2003 and with no comment at all (examples: #57303, #83387, #58598). I know that not all patches are good or correct but IMHO this leaves a bad impression on our project.
We all know that patches are often the first step to become a KDE contributor and we tell people to attach their patches to a bug report so they don’t get lost. But what’s the sense for this when those reports are then ignored for months?
So lets show that we are thankful for the patches by letting the good ones into our subversion repository.