Re: Seeking a "Patch Champion"

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com> writes:

> 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.

Well, that's what happens to patches on emacs-devel.  The ones submitted
to the bug tracker never fade away.

> 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/

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grow increasingly outdated.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.

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.

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...)

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...

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no