Re: patch tracking

[Zack Weinberg <zack at codesourcery dot com>]

On Fri, Sep 14, 2001 at 05:16:48PM -0400, Phil Edwards wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 14, 2001 at 02:02:54PM -0700, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> > I have not decided whether the tracker should generate one big nag
> > message per week, or follow up to each individual thread.  The former
> > would be less obnoxious, but then obnoxiousness is kind of the point.
> 
> How about individual messages to the people privately, and one big summary
> to the list?  If I were to receive N nag messages, it would be easier to
> delete each message as I review the patch.  With a big summary, I must
> remember which ones I have since reviewed; with individual nags, I can
> simply look at which messages remain in my mailbox.

Good idea, but which people do you mean?  One of the contributing
factors to this problem is that for large parts of the compiler there
is no one person who should be reminded to review patches.  Either
there is a group, and which one do you pick? or there is no one at
all, and you're left flooding the blanket write people, who are
already overloaded.

Better just to post nags to the list, I think.

> Although I must point out that the problem of patch queuing has been solved
> before.  I strongly recommend adopting something used on sourceforge or
> mozilla or whatever for GCC's purposes.  Else we're right back where we
> started:  people needing to be freed up for patch review (Zack) are getting
> stuck with other duties (writing patch queuing nagging programs).  Granted,
> Zack's doing this already on his own, but it made a good example. *grin*

I don't know what sourceforge or mozilla or whatever use, but I'm
willing to bet it's web-centric.  Maybe I'm strange but I infinitely
prefer systems which are email-centric.

Also, I'm not usually the person reviewing patches.  I'm usually the
person waiting for patches to be reviewed.  (We don't get that many
patches for cpplib over the transom, y'know.)  If I can use some of
that waiting time to avoid having to wait so much in the future, well,
why not?

zw