Why do more widely-adopted OSS take so long to review patches?

Aatube@kbin.melroy.org to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 19 points –

Take Firefox's 1542044, where the dark mode theme colors aren't exposed when they should. The patch has been up for 4 years.

Or, take this, which is part of a series that added Doxygen parsing to clangd, a language server. It was left unreviewed until late 2022, the patcher went in conversation with the reviewer, but then met radio silence again, long enough to the point where the patch-reviewing service shut down. Clangd currently has only 44 open PRs to review, though it uses the same issue tracker as llvm for some reason.

Aren't we paying them to do all this?

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Aren’t we paying them to do all this?

No? This question indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of the social relations, power dynamics, and motivations in open source software.

How do I learn more about these things?

I don't know, if there's a more general resource, but in the case of Firefox, the donations are so far away from covering the development costs, that they're not even being used for that. Rather, they earn money from search engine deals and are trying to diversify with Pocket, ads, MDN- and VPN-related services etc..

In the case of LLVM, I don't see how they would get many donations to begin with. Maybe Mozilla chips them some of that leftover donation money (they have been doing that with various smaller OSS projects), but I can't imagine much else.
LLVM is probably largely being kept alive by companies or programming language orgs scratching their own itches.

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This is a good question. I learned it the slow, hard way, back when Apache was “a patchy server”. Maybe someone can suggest books or online resources for getting up to speed quicker.

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