Patch approval statistics for R13B04

[Björn Gustavsson]

Now that R13B04 is feature-frozen, I can present
some statistics about the patches we have received.

In the git repository, there are commits from 32 persons
from outside the Erlang/OTP group in the ccase/r13b04_dev
branch (i.e. to be included in R13B04).

Manually counting through the "What's cooking" emails
sent to the erlang-patches mailing list, I got the following
statistics:

Number of patches included in R13B04: 51
Total number of dropped patches: 7
Stalled patches: 5

Of the dropped patches, 4 pointed out bugs and
misfeatures that we chose to address in a different way.
One dropped patch updated a deprecated module.

Two patches were dropped because we found
serious issues and the authors didn't submit
revised patches.

Note that of the 51 approved patches, several went
through one more revisions by their authors to make
them OTP worthy before we approved them.

Statistics can never predict the future, but it
seems that patches of good quality (OTP worthy)
will have a good chance to be included in future
OTP releases.

Note that we never approve or reject unseen
patches. An idea that seems good when
explained in an email could turn out to have
issues when run through our test suites,
and conversely, an idea that seemed
bad maybe seemed bad only because
we didn't fully understand it.

So instead of writing an email beforehand
explaining what your patch will do, I suggest that you
put the effort into a good commit message
that contains a good description of the problem
and/or use case, and a rationale to justify
the way you chose to solve it. That information
will speed up the reviewing process, and more
importantly, it will help anyone 5 years from
now to understand why the **** the change was
made.

Thanks to everyone that have sent us patches
so far. I am looking forward to receiving many
more good patches.

-- 
Björn Gustavsson, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB