Troy Rollo wrote:
As I speculated, the reason the PPC64 Patchwork example was so out of date was that the PPC64 list had been folded into the vanilla PPC list, however the big problem right now is that Patchwork is "extra work" for maintainers, so right now they don't want to use it.
Ouch. This is what I fear.
Jeremy - do you have any documentation for this from the last time you looked at implementing patch managemen, and if so is it up to date for Git?
Well, despite my doubts of the usefulness of this, I remain quite interested in trying to improve the process.
I should warn you, though, I'm famous within CodeWeavers for having 'Clever Ideas That No One Uses' (TM). I fear that a patch tracker is just one such.
But here is a private thread between myself and Alexandre, in which I noodled on a possible approach, and in which Alexandre shot me down <grin>.
-------------------
Okay, so here's is my next Clever Idea That Isn't Used (CITIU):
Assumptions:
1. We can write a utility that lets us compare a winehq commit message to a wine-patches email and see if there is a 'match'. 100% isn't required, but some nice non zero number is.
A key requirement is that there are near zero false hits.
2. We can write a utility that lets us look at an email on wine-devel and see if it is a reply to a patch on wine-patches.
Again, the assumption is that 100% match isn't needed. For this one, though, we should be able to do much better (as we'll have a message id usually).
We also can tolerate very few false hits here as well.
Tasklist:
1. Build a process that receives email from wine-patches, wine-devel, and wine-cvs. Each new email to wine-patches goes into a database.
2. Each email from wine-cvs looks for a patch in the db, and deletes a matching patch. (Or perhaps sets status to 'committed').
3. Each email from wine-devel looks for a matching patch in the db, and if there is a hit in the db, we delete it as well. (Or perhaps set status to 'replied').
4. We write a web page that displays all patches in the db, with some nice filters. It has a button to allow someone to change a patch status (that way, we can clean up for the cases where a human being can see that there was a match, but the process couldn't).
Hoped for Result:
1. You do nothing new.
2. Other wine-hackers can see what patches are apparently headed through cracks, and get a chance to jump on them.
3. People who submitted a patch have a page to see the status, and get a clue as to what might have happened to it.
Possible futures:
1. We could give you a 'urk!' button somewhere that would actively flag a patch as something you'd appreciate someone else think about; that could raise them up.
If we do this as a daemon, we could probably even do it trivially as a reply-to patch-daemon@winehq.org right out of emacs.
(We can get even fancier here; the sky is the limit, but I fear too much cleverness).
Issues I see:
1. Yet Another Clever But Unused Idea
2. Private emails are unaccounted for. Are they a major factor?
3. Haven't proven our assumptions yet
-----------------
To the private email issues, Alexandre replied:
There are a fair number of such cases, yes. Not so much the bad patches but the corrupted/mangled/doesn't apply patches; I don't want to fill wine-devel with "this patch is corrupted please resend". And I know other people often reply in private too, for instance when someone forgot the attachment.
Also there are a lot of cases where a patch won't get committed but shouldn't be in the list, people often supersede their own patches, or two people fix the same thing in two different ways, etc. So I feel it would require active monitoring to keep the list somewhat up to date, and I don't know that there would be people willing to do that in the long run.
----------------
I guess it's the latter point that is key. We can automate some of this, but in the end, some human monitoring will be required.
Being a foolish optimist, I don't see any harm in trying, particularly if we focus on benefit #1 (Alexandre doesn't have to do anything :-/).
But I should point out I'm not rushing to volunteer to write the daemon or revise Patchwork or actually do any useful work...
Cheers,
Jeremy