Hi,
I'm looking to start a conversation on how we can coordinate timely
verification of patch submissions.  As you have probably noticed, Catalina
and I have been working on a patch for OPENJPA-15 (
http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OPENJPA-15).  Granted, we have had a
couple of miscues as we continue to learn the patching and contribution
processes.  But, we have also had to regenerate the patch a few times
because of changes being integrated into the affected files before the patch
could be verified.

I'm wondering if this is BAU in the open-source community, or is there
something we can do to help this process?

I know there was a discussion about having the ability to flag a JIRA report
when a patch is attached.  I don't believe I've seen resolution of that
request.  Flagging a JIRA report might help some, but it still doesn't help
with a timely verification of the patch.  At least it would raise the
awareness that patches are available for verification.  And, any new change
activities should check for possible patches before hitting the commit
button.

Since this OpenJPA community is still highly reliant on the original authors
of the contribution, I guess this question is mostly directed at them.  Once
more of us non-BEA committers become familiar enough with the code base, we
can help with this verification process to help spread the wealth.  But, in
the mean time, it would seem that we need to figure out some process for
verifying patches before the next set of changes gets committed and makes
the patch null-and-void.

Thoughts?

Kevin