[Development] Trouble getting reviews in months and years

[Volker Hilsheimer]

> On 8 Oct 2024, at 01:41, Ilya Fedin <fedin-ilja2010 at ya.ru> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 07 Oct 2024 07:42:11 -0700
> Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com> wrote:
> 
>> You're generalising. The fact that those contributions weren't wanted
>> or were misunderstood is not an indication that everyone's
>> contributions will suffer the same consequences.
>> 
> 
> Well, I told my experience. I was also asking another person who
> is trying to contribute Qt, too, about his expereince, he said he also
> can't get reviews in reasonable times. IIRC he has has too around 10
> open changes and most of them are open for a long time.
> 
> I'm doubt anyone can really say what's the experience on average,
> given that you won't be aware until someone gets to the mailing list.


Hi Ilya,


I’m sorry that your experience with contributing to Qt is less than stellar. Working on the platform integration of Qt, and perhaps in particular on the Xcb integration, is certainly challenging, for at least two reasons: the amount of variations of Linux systems; and the fact that much of that code is largely untested, and perhaps even untestable, through automatic testing. So regressions easily go unnoticed.

Given that, reviewers and platform maintainers are understandably very cautious with accepting patches to bugs that they can’t reproduce on the systems that they might have access to. There’s nothing wrong with that, even if it can make it an up-hill battle to get changes in that look obvious to you and are improving your particular experience with the framework.

Claiming that people are “gaslighting you” is a strong accusation, implying malicious intent. From what I have seen, people are rejecting your patches because they can’t reproduce the bug, and are wary of the change breaking things on systems on which there are no problems today. Nobody is claiming that it’s your fault that Qt doesn’t behave the way you expect it to, and nobody is trying to manipulate you into thinking that you are imagining things.

So, I’d appreciate if you’d choose your claims a bit more carefully.


Best regards,
Volker