Sunday, November 30, 2008

Patches, Patches, and More Patches

On November 13, I mailed our development list about our open patches. At the time we had 93 patches open on our Trac. Since then, some work has gone on with respect to patches, a lot of it from me. In the last 17 days, there have been 23 patches committed. Not all of those tickets were marked as patches, however. There have also been a number of new patch tickets opened, bringing our total patch count down by only 11 to 82.

Now, out of those 82 patches, if we ignore the ones we've put on the Patches Needing Improvement milestone, we have 57 patches. Here is where we see a significant difference, as out of the former 93 patches, 75 were not on a milestone, indicating that the patches that have changed to the Patches Needing Improvement milestone had not been previously reviewed, or had been reviewed but not marked appropriately on Trac.

Among some notable patches that were accepted include MD5 authentication support for ICQ; fixes for Gadu-Gadu, Zephyr, and SIMPLE; ICQ X-status support (which can't be included until at least 2.6.0); and support for connecting to an XMPP server without specifying a resource, thus causing compliant servers to generate a resource for us. Aside from the X-status patch, all the ones I've just mentioned will be in 2.5.3.

But the work isn't done yet! We still need a lot of patch review from Pidgin developers. Also, a lot of patches need work, so there's still plenty to do if anyone wants to help! I, for one, certainly won't complain if someone comes along and fixes up a patch that needs work, and such fixing will make it much more likely that the patch will be accepted.

For reference, I also mailed the development list earlier today to discuss patches again, here.

Ah, how our work never ends...