Re: Classpath future?

[Stuart Ballard]

Mark Wielaard wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 03:01:18PM -0400, Etienne M. Gagnon wrote:
> >
> > I have many months ago sent a few patches on this list.  These were
> > probably small enough not to require paperwork, but nothing happened.
> Oops. Sorry, we have dropped the ball then.
> Could you please resent them (or give me the month you sent them so I
> can look them up in the archives). Note that the new Savannah setup has
> a patch manager that we should use and that hopefully prevents patches
> from being dropped. <http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/classpath>

Is there any way, through use of a patch manager, that patches could be
*added* right away but somehow scheduled to be *reverted* after a
certain period of time if copyright assignment is not received?[1]

That way people could start hacking right away and committing stuff, but
the contributions from hackers who hadn't yet done the assignment would
be clearly visible, and able to be removed if (for example) a new
release was upcoming and their papers weren't in yet.

A mechanism like the above would also mean that *people*, as well as
*patches*, wouldn't just be dropped - it would be easy to see if someone
has been outstanding assignment-wise for a long time and contact them to
see what their status is.

Stuart.

[1] Obviously there are numerous potential problems with reverting a
patch if the same code has been touched by others. But the majority of
patches by "new" hackers are small and thus statistically unlikely to
collide, and hopefully by the time anyone is providing more significant
patches their assignments will already be complete.