On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 5:21 PM, Rob Shearman robertshearman@gmail.com wrote:
I don't like this idea because of the expression "If you gave an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters they would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare." In other words, if someone were to just send patches all day to patchwatcher, changing one thing at a time until they passed then one would eventually get through. However, the result in this case would probably not be a quality patch since patchwatcher would not be able to catch all possible bugs.
We want to be able to track how many retries a patch has had to go through before getting through since the more it had the more bugs it is likely to have. Therefore, we want all patchwatcher failures to go to a separate mailing list where we can see if a patch is being sent repeatedly so that we can email them to say "hey, you may want to take a while to rethink this patch or ask for help on wine-devel".
I agree with that. There is no reason why the wine-patches-testing thing could not be a separate mailing list that we could monitor as well. I just don't think it would need that high level of attention like wine-patches because it would be the exception case rather than the rule (assuming we get winetest passing for most people before they submit patches), interested parties could review it, albeit less often and still have the effect of filtering the spam from the main mailing list.
James, please note that I'm not accusing you of being one of said monkeys, I realise this is an exception :-)
Me either. =) It was just seeing this thread made me think about it more and it did not seem that we had clear consensus on this issue at wineconf. In the end it does not matter, Alexandre will decide what works best for him. I think thats going to end up being some sort of tagging system like we discussed so that all patches good and bad get through with review. It would just be nice to have an outside way to privately send patches to patchwatcher without spamming everyone else.