Handling of Glibc Patches

[Andreas Jaeger <aj at suse dot de>]

During the last time I've noticed that different people came up with
patches for the same problem - often even with the same patches.

As a small example, I made this morning a tiny patch to integrate the
two new constants from Linux 2.3.29 - only to find out when I'm ready
with my email that Ulrich has just checked in these patches.  I don't
think there was a way to avoid this specific problem at all [1] - but
often there's more time between the submission of the patches and
duplication of work could have been reduced.

The same patches generated by different developers implies a
unnecessary duplication of work.  Since the group of core developers
is quite small and most of us don't have that much spare time, we
should reduce this overlap as much as possible.

What can be done to improve the handling of patches?

One solution would be to create a libc-patches list where everybody
would send patches to (similar to gcc-patches).  This way we could see
what others have done, comment on the patches and don't duplicate the
work.;-)

What do you think?

Andreas

Footnotes: 
[1]  Since we worked simultaneously on it.
-- 
 Andreas Jaeger
  SuSE Labs aj@suse.de
   private aj@arthur.rhein-neckar.de