[Mono-dev] Unit Testing process: Community Contributions

[Edward Ned Harvey (mono)]

> From: Miguel de Icaza [mailto:miguel at xamarin.com]
> 
> The build bot does some of this work when you submit a pull request.   It
> does not cover all platforms, nor all configurations, but it is a good first step.
> 
> But this is not a problem.   Not every patch affects all systems, and most of
> the code is cross platform, so testing on one is enough.

Can you please provide a better response?

The underlying question is, "How can we improve the state of affairs and allow a better sense of open source community involvement and contribution?"  The presumption so far has been, the enormous backlog of pull requests and ignored bugfixes is caused by the necessity to test and review them, for fear that the community contributions will break stuff.  But if the test process is fully automated, I guess that's not really the issue.

As a business owner who has staked the success of his entire company on the use and adoption of mono and Xamarin, and as a software developer, I am constantly asked by others to review my experience, and assess whether or not I would advocate those decisions to others, or regret my decisions.  It is extremely difficult to justify these decisions if it is impossible to get either free or commercial support for a core technology, *and* even if you fix some bug yourself you still can't submit or get any review or any type of resolution to the problem.

The sense of community contributions and bugfixes going unresolved hurts the community and hurts adoption / advocacy for mono.  Here's hoping we can overcome that problem.