Bruce Momjian wrote:
IMHO an mbox is not the right interface either, though. I guess there
must be something in the middle, like a *cough*patch manager*cough*. At
least there should be a way to mark patches: a "is this a patch" (or
merely discussion) boolean; and a free-form field where other people can
make comments. Well, I guess that's what Review Board is for. I think
we should start asking patch submitters to load their patches on RB.
Not sure if this is platform-specific, but I keep being annoyed by not
being able to actually *view* the patches in the queue. I have to
download them, and then open them separately. I can't just view them in
the browser, because they're all named ".bin" and come out as mime type
"application/octet-stream".
(That particular problem would be fixed if they were accessible through
for example IMAP)
Frankly I think the structuring of the data is the hard part. For 8.3
we had that web page that tracked the outstanding patches and that was
very useful because the patches were addressed over a 4-5 month period.
As Tom already said, we need to differ between the long-review patches
and the quick fixes. The quick fixes work fine the way we do it now, the
more advanced long-review patches don't really.
Ideally we could have that status for all patches all the time, but the
time required to structure/categorize them often isn't worth it. We
could have the submitters do the categorizing or the patch appliers, but
in many cases the structuring is more work than just getting the patch
applied and completed.
It may not be worth it for the quick-fixes, but it certainly is for the
longer ones. The wiki page was very useful.
It would also be better to be able to off-load it to more than one
person. For example, I would like to be able to get into the unapplied
patches list and remove the email about events on 8.3RC1. First of all,
it's not a patch, but it's listed under it. But more importantly, it has
been fixed and should just be removed. So I now have to email you to ask
you to remove it, and then you have to do the actual work, which means
double work.
In fact, those two mbox archives need to be renamed - they're not
actually patches, from what I can tell, they're more "patches and
discussions that appear interesting for this release", no?
If you think it would be easy to get patch submitters to categorize,
realize we have some very skilled people who don't even send email
reports of bugs, they just report them on IRC and can't be bothered with
email. If email is a burden for them, imagine filling in a web form.
A whole lot of people find it much easier, and less of a burden, to
submit something like this through a web interface, than through an
email. For several reasons, one being that almost everything else they
do "on the net" is through web interfaces of different kinds. Another
being that they don't have to subscribe to anything, they can just post it.
//Magnus
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