Hi hp, thanks for the notes, I'm just going to highlight my point of view.
Regarding patch pinging, my take is that is should be seldom necessary, for example I tend to forget my small patches after sometime. So IMHO anyone replying anything is good, especially if he CCs the maintainer (Dodji-style :-). As you said, a get_maintainer script would come handy.
It's also the case that I often send RFC patches: patches with comments discussing a controversial idea, probably without changelog or regression testing. Sometimes I don't even CC anyone since I don't really expect a review, I only want to raise discussion.
Unfortunately such patches are 80% probable to be completely ignored. What do you think?
Finally, as I mentioned in the BOF it would be useful to be able to connect somehow the two patch management systems: bugzilla and ML. I'm not quite sure of the way, but here are the ideas:
* Automatically post bugzilla diffs to the ML, but then there is the problem of who answers where (hopefully not a problem if the automated mail has all subscribed to the bug CC'd).
* Have a field in the bugzilla keeping "related ML threads" URLs. What I do now is post a separate comment saying "discussed here" or "posted patch here". Not sure if good enough, but on bugs I've not seen it in cases I needed to.
Thanks, Dimitris
