[Development] Trouble getting reviews in months and years

[Ilya Fedin]

If anyone has any interest on how
https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2024-April/045167.html
did end, here's the summary:

> https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/+/343628

Maybe there was any misundestanding during the review but it has felt
like reviewers are gaslighting me. Like, I checked the patch on a wide
range of DEs, I was trying to explain that the UX is better when
reading X resources on KDE but reviewers were not hearing that and just
repeating the same thing in a circle that "KDE uses fontconfig". While
the reality is that it supports both.

> https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/+/444859

I just abandoned this one. No one reviewed it and I'm pretty much
sure they would set -1 or -2 with a similar kind of
bureaucratic/gaslighting explanation.

> https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/+/427313
> https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/+/417817

There's gaslighting again with statements like

> There is neither a bug, nor the need to change anything.

(QTBUG-124303 exists)

It feels pretty much like that reviewers just don't want to take their
time to see what's the real state of the things in the modern Linux.

> OpenSuSE, RHEL, Debian and Ubuntu maintain correct DPI values in
> XSettings. I haven't checked, if they also support Xresources and if
> so, which one is leading.

> https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/+/471045

Reviewers said they can't reproduce the bug and gave -1 because of
that but the bug report is still open. IDK what to do about that and I
have tired aruging with them so abandoned.

> https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/+/501396

I'm tired on previous ones so just abandoned.

> https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/+/519479

I'm tired on previous ones so just abandoned.

> https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/+/515131

The only one I haven't abandoned but it's still ignored. Going to
abandon it in a week if it won't get any attention...

> https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/+/528953

The only one merged.


There was a thread on the mailing list on how to get new contributors.
It was discussing problems like simplifying cloning the repo. I'd say
the problem is not that but just that Qt doesn't really need or want
contributions. It seems the maintainers are fine with current behavior
and bugs and don't want any changes (contributions). The icing on the
cake is that one has to ping for years just to see that the
contributions aren't really wanted. Although perhaps most contributors
get that by the reviewers silence itself, I guess a little amount of
people ping for years or go to mailing list.

Another thing is that various proposals such as
https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2022-June/042650.html
get ignored on the mailing list while bikeshedding on C++ things gets
LOTS of replies. Well, even this thread I had to ping multiple times to
get any attention.

Personally I now have way less desire to upstream patches to Qt. I
tried to push some changes fixing font/style update on gerrit a week
ago but the reaction so far looks like that it's not wanted either. It
seems working around Qt bugs is a way more productive approach than
fixing them.