Re: Seeking a "Patch Champion"

[Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
>I'm afraid I don't think this is likely to help much.  Since it's not
>hooked up to the bug tracker, the list of patches on that site will just
>grow increasingly outdated.  Having somebody herd a patch after it's
>already been applied is a waste of everybody's time.

Just having something that auto-detects all the patches on the mailing list, so there's an easy, "one-stop-shopping" place to find them, could help al ot.  Once the Patch Champion knows that a patch is being handled, or at least is being tracked in Debbugs, they can mark the patch as closed in Patchwork.

Patchwork already natively has the states "Accepted", "Rejected", and "Under Review", and has an "archive" feature to get the patch out of the main list.  We can either use those existing features/states, or perhaps make new states if needed -- see patchwork/fixtures/default_states.xml in the Patchwork source tree for more.

>And I don't think adding yet another formality to the already pretty
>complicated "apply this patch already" "work flow" (for want of a better
>word) is the way to go.

Well, I don't think John's proposal adds any burden to the patch *submitter*.  Rather, he is proposing a role, Patch Champion, along with a tool (Patchwork) that makes that role feasible.

The idea here is to reduce the burden on patch submitters, by having the project -- via the Patch Champion(s) -- keep better track of patches that have been posted on the mailing list.

>But the lost patch situation in Emacs is a genuine problem, and one that
>I think may be disencouraging new contributors.  Here's what I think
>should happen:
>
>1) Whenever somebody posts a patch to emacs-devel, and you don't feel
>like applying it at once, tell them "send this via `M-x
>report-emacs-bug', otherwise it'll never be applied".
>
>2) People interested in herding patches should start using debbugs-gnu.
>I've now added another command to make this easier -- just say `M-x
>debbugs-gnu-patches', and you'll get a nice list of all the bug reports
>that contain patches.  (Or at least the ones that have been marked as
>such, but that's pretty much all of them...)

These two ideas would add burden to the patch submitter, I think, unlike John's proposal.

>And I think that debbugs*.el should be included in Emacs core, so that
>we can get some traction here.  Installing a package is apparently way
>too much work for most people...

No objection there, of course.

(Confidential to John: you might be amused to see http://viewvc.red-bean.com/producingoss?view=revision&revision=2965 :-) The "Patch Champion" role seems to be what I call "Patch Manager" in that section.)

Best regards,
-Karl