Seeking a "Patch Champion"

[John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com>]

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Greetings Emacsers!

It has been brought to my attention, a few times now, that many of the patches
submitted to our project -- through the mailing list, and issue reports --
tend to wither and die before getting a chance to be reviewed and merged.

Largely this is because we have so many of them: 435 this year, so far. And no
one (besides myself, who has been fully derelict in this duty) is currently
dedicated to ensuring that each of these patches receives due attention.
Unless someone with commit access has a particular interest in attending to a
patch right away, it generally fades into history.

I would like to change this state of affairs by asking for a core of
volunteers who are willing to champion patches, and ensure that they go
through a process of review before being either rejected or applied.

To assist this effort, I've connected our mailing lists with a service running
on my own VPS (for now) called "Patchwork"[1]:

    http://patchwork.newartisans.com/

Every patch sent -- either on emacs-devel or bug-gnu-emacs -- is captured by
this server and assigned a ticket number. Note: these are not *issue tickets*,
but *patch tickets*, one for each patch, even if multiple patches are
submitted for a single bug[2]. Also, any discussion related to a particular
patch is captured, and preserved along with that patch ticket.

Although Patchwork offers a Web interface, there is also a command-line client
for listing patches, changing their state, delegating them to others, and even
applying them directly into Git. You only need git clone the Patchwork
sources, and use their "pwclient" Python script.[3]

The hope is that this tool will allow our patch champions to more easily tame
the set of outstanding patches, and move them from state to state until they
are either accepted or rejected.

I've pre-seeded the Patchwork server with all the patches from 2016 to date.
If there are more patches from earlier that you'd like to see in the system,
just resend the related e-mail to: patchwork@newartisans.com.

Footnotes: 
[1]  Patchwork relies entirely on free and libre software, notably:
       Patchwork     GPL
       Django        BSD
       Python        Python (GPL compatible)
       MySQL         GPL
       MySQL-python  LGPL
       uwsgi         GPL
       nginx         "2-clause BSD-like"

    Javascript used:
       bootstrap     MIT
       selectize     Apache
       jQuery        MIT

[2]  Related patches may be grouped together into "bundles".

[3]  After setting ~/.pwclientrc to:

    [options]
    default=emacs-devel
    
    [emacs-devel]
    url=http://patchwork.newartisans.com/xmlrpc/
    
    [emacs-bugs]
    url=http://patchwork.newartisans.com/xmlrpc/

-- 
John Wiegley                  GPG fingerprint = 4710 CF98 AF9B 327B B80F
http://newartisans.com                          60E1 46C4 BD1A 7AC1 4BA2

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