Hello, I really welcome the stuff in DEP 3. I've just scanned over the existing threads and haven't seen the following points made, but please excuse me if I missed a discussion already.
One thing I would like to see patch metadata help facilitate is patch review. At the moment the "Reviewed-by" header proposed would allow a tool to ensure at least two sets of eyeballs had seen a patch; however, patches can go stale. I think some chronological information is needed alongside the review. I propose a "Last-Reviewed" header to capture this information. I decided on a separate header for this for two reasons * adding the date info to the Reviewed-by header will make it quite a lot longer * generally you only need to know the date of the last review, not the date of last review per reviewer. Secondly, why not use RFC 2822 for the date field used in Last-Update (and my proposed Last-Reviewed)? It has a better granularity including timezone support, is output by GNU date(1) easily with the -R argument and is already in use for email Date: headers and Debian .changes files amongst others. -- Jon Dowland
Index: dep3.mdwn
===================================================================
--- dep3.mdwn (revision 69)
+++ dep3.mdwn (working copy)
@@ -145,11 +145,20 @@
field can be used mutiple times if several persons reviewed the
patch.
+ * `Last-Reviewed` (optional)
+
+ This field can be used to indicate when the patch was last reviewed. It
+ should list the email address of the reviewer (surrounded by
+ angle-brackets) and date when the patch was reviewed. The email address
+ should correspond to one used in a `Reviewed-By` header. The date should
+ be in RFC 2822 format. Example:
+ `Last-Reviewed: Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:10:35 +0100 by <j...@debian.org>`
+
* `Last-Update` (optional)
-
This field can be used to record the date when the meta-information
- have been last updated. It should use the ISO date format
- `YYYY-MM-DD`.
+ have been last updated. It should use be in RFC 2822 format, such as
+ generated by GNU `date(1)` with the `-R` switch. Example:
+ `Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:10:35 +0100`
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