On Wed, 10 Jun 2009, Weddington, Eric wrote: > From my experience having patches go to a mailing list is a sure way to > have them get lost. When it goes into someone's inbox, it's likely to > get pushed down, and "out of sight, out of mind" quickly. While the ML > is archived, it is not as useful to search through as having a specific > patch tracker/database, e.g. as found on SourceForge or Savannah > projects. AFAIK the only gcc patch tracker being used is not used on a > mandatory basis. > > While I'm not suggesting that gcc use SF/Savannah, it seems odd that gcc > has a bug database, but no patch tracking database.
Sure, a database is useful; I identified Bugzilla as a model that has worked well. Email works very well for the initial feed of all GCC development traffic since the last time it was checked including bugs, comments on bugs, patches and comments on patches, and provides the first pass of acquainting people with new developments coming in and allowing quick responses; the database for finding later bugs meeting given criteria that didn't get dealt with in the initial email pass. The database works well for tracking over time narrowly focused discussion on a particular well-defined bug; rather less well when the discussion diverges and there is no longer a clear concept of exactly what bug the database entry relates to (I think the same would apply to any system tracking patch discussion: it would get less useful when the discussion diverges away from a patch to deal with a clearly defined issue). If Bugzilla included patch attachments in the body of emails it sent rather than as URLs only, it might even work OK for patch review, especially if it could somehow tell when messages should go to gcc-patches and when to gcc-bugs. If I want to find a particular past *development* discussion, I don't necessarily remember which list it appeared on but may have other context for it; grepping my mailboxes for it sometimes helps, as may searching for information in the online archives, and in both cases it is very useful that bug discussions appear in gcc-bugs mailboxes and archives rather than needing a different search system in a different database to be used for those. Sending a message to my inbox and *not* to the relevant mailing list is a very good way of making it less likely I'll respond to it; I'll ignore direct copies of messages that "should have" gone to a mailing list on the basis that I'll deal with the list copy later when reading my list mailbox, but I may not notice that the message did not in fact go to a list after all. -- Joseph S. Myers jos...@codesourcery.com
