Patches are code contributions mostly used by external developers (community members outside Sun). A developer find an bug/enhancement and a solution. Without using build environment ( ChildWorkSpace) etc. the code snippet can be contributed as patch in IssueTracker. The issue will be taken over from someone who is willing to bring in the patches into a CWS and the QA approval processes. On this way 300 issues with patches are integrated in OOo 3.0. See more details about OOo 3.0 in my last blog.

To get an overview about patch contribution on OOo, let's take a look into the issues which are flagged as patch and which were submitted in 2008 (until October '08).

When were these patches reported?

From January to October 2008 489 issues with type 'patch' are submitted in IssueTracker. The following graph show the allocation over the months.

How many patches are untouched?

The biggest part (69%) of the patches are fixed. Only 20% of the patches are in state 'new' or 'started'. Unconfirmed issues are only 12 issues (2,5%). The rest (8%) are closed as duplicate, invalid or another status.

In which version the fixed patches are integrated?

Most of the patches (63%) were integrated in the last release – OOo 3.0. The next mass of issues (24%) are integrated or are planned to integrate in OOo 3.1. This means most of the patches are integrated early for the next feature releases.

Which components get the most patches?

Most of the patches are submitted for the build environment, tools etc. It's different as for general bug fixing. Here are the applications like word processing and spreadsheet at the first ranks.

Who submitted most patches?

Most of the patches - nearly 32% of all submitted patches - were contributed by cmc. Beside the top10 it isn't easy to find out, if the issue is reported by the patch submitter or the issue was submitted by someone who found the bug. So it isn't so easy to find out, how many different patch contributors there were.

How many patches were submitted the past years?

To can compare the ratio of the submitted patches for the past years, the numbers are related to the patches submitted per month.

The number over the past years were simply the same. In the past 9 months of 2008 the number decreased by 7-8 patches per month.

What does the decrease identify? Difficult to say. The allocation in which components the patches were delivered changed over the years. From 2005-2007 more than 26% of all patches were delivered for the porting project – in 2008 only 5%. The same for L10N components. From 2005-2008 nearly 12% of all patches were for that project – in 2008 only 2%. So perhaps contributors went away from OOo or the projects are more stable as in the past and less patches are needed in such projects.

How many patches are still open / backlog from the past years?

In sum nearly ~3950 issues which are marked as patches were submitted for OOo in the past years. Only 137 (3.5%) of them are marked as 'new', 70 (2%) marked as 'started' and 18 (0.5%) are unconfirmed. Most of the issues, 3225 or 82% are in state fixed. So the backlog isn't high.

Resume

Patches seems to be still a good way to bring in code snippets (bug fixes, translation, enhancements, fixes for tooling, fixes for build environment etc.) from external developers into the code line of OOo without using the processes of ChildWorkSpace handling and QA. If the patches the right way to increase the code contribution on OOo, I do not know.