January CommitFest is underway!

Greetings!

The January commitfest (the second-to-last of the PG11 release cycle,
which likely means lots of big patches landing, since big patches
aren't allowed to be first seen in the last commitfest before feature
freeze... ;) has officially begun and we have a lot of work ahead of us.

To the numbers:

We have *109* patches needing review. These patches range from small to
big, so please, consider what you have time for. If you have time to
review a small patch then please claim it and post a review and consider
what the next status should be for the patch (either 'waiting on author'
or 'ready for committer' typically). If you really have the time to
review a large patch, please do so also, but please don't commit to
reviewing a patch (large or small) and then not actually do so in a
reasonable amount of time afterwards- taking a patch to review indicates
that you are *actively* working on reviewing that patch.

We have 33 patches already in Waiting on Author state. If this is the
state of your patch, be sure that you'll be hearing from me soon (unless
you've provided recent updates). Patches which remain in the Waiting on
Author state for a long time are not likely to get the necessary reviews
to get it to 'Ready for committer' status. If you care about your
patch, please put effort into it! If you don't, well, perhaps that
means we shouldn't either ...

Committers! We have 24 patches marked as ready for committer. If you
see serious issues with those patches, please speak up sooner rather
than later. We need to make sure that the authors and reviewers of
patches understand what our concerns are and how they can make progress
(or, if it's simply not going to happen, why). With that said...

We already have 35 patches committed! That's fantastic for the third
day into the commitfest, but let's not fool ourselves- quite a few of
those were committed before the CF even started. Still, it's good
progress towards the total of *203* patches in this CF.

I'm thrilled to see this CF already moving along well, but let's all try
to focus a bit in these next few weeks to make as much progress towards
getting patches committed as possible. If you have any questions or
concerns regarding patches in any state, please feel free to contact me
directly and I'll do my best to help.

Thanks!

Stephen