On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 2:08 AM, Alexandre Julliard julliard@winehq.org wrote:
I think it would be quite useful. For instance it would allow sending a nice reminder to the author to rethink/resend their patch if it hasn't been applied after a week or so. It would also enable me (and other reviewers) to always get an up-to-date list of patches that need to be looked at, instead of having to keep track of it locally.
Of course that would also require other ways to take patches off the list, for instance when an updated patch has been sent, or when someone else fixed the bug differently. I certainly agree it's not trivial to implement.
Many people have tried implementing patch trackers (e.g. Danny Berlin did a simple one,http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GCC_Patch_Tracking) but they don't seem to survive long, so doing a useful one must be a challenge.
It would be hard to recognize later versions of the same patch, even with the '(try 2)' convention, since they often get split and munged while being beaten into submission. So Patchwatcher would have to have a way for developers to manually mark old patchsets as obsolete.
Most developers probably wouldn't bother unless this was really, really easy. I can't imagine that happening unless, say, we start requiring patches to be submitted via a secure web interface that verifies that the author has signed the Wine Contributors Agreement etc. At which point it wouldn't be too hard to coax developers into clicking a box saying "obsoletes this old patchset". But that'd be a pretty big change in wine's workflow. - Dan