Starting to track patches through bugzilla

[Daniel Berlin <dberlin at dberlin dot org>]

After discussing it on IRC (the words "This is trivial" were uttered, 
the gauntlet laid down, and the challenge taken up), i'm starting to 
work on tracking patches +followup discussion through bugzilla, so that 
they don't get lost, and so we can associate bugs as being blocked on 
the patches that fix them (and whatnot).


An example can be seen at 
http://dberlin.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=11757


Userids it can't determine (due to non-existent bugzilla accounts or 
not writing from the same email address you use in your bugzilla mail) 
are currently set to me, rather than creating them new accounts.  It'll 
likely just be set to an "unknown commenter" account with the from 
pasted into the text of their followup.

The bugs from 11750 onwards are patches processed from the gcc-patches 
archive since June.

The idea is to get something that is "good enough", but not in the way 
or annoying to deal with.

An example of this theory is that patches with subjects not starting 
with [PATCH] don't get processed (and any followup referencing them 
won't get processed as a result).  This is good enough, since people 
are supposed to do it. Patches that don't do it have the same chance as 
before of being lost in the ether.

I'll probably make a patch component/version so that they don't get the 
defaults (2.95/pending), since their is no way to tell either, and 
trying to make people put this info in would probably not actually 
happen, and just cause the patch tracker to be less used.

The only real thing left is a way to note that patches should be closed.

This will require some special keyword in the followups that we can 
notice, like a single line containing "NOPE or APPROVED".
(we've been discussing trying to use the cvs commit messages in some 
way to do this automatically, but it's really non-trivial)

It already handles attachments.

It doesn't attempt to seperate the inline diffs from the messages, 
though i'm sure this could be added later on.

Thoughts?

Trivial feature requests?

Note that people with mailers that don't set references/in-reply-to 
properly, of course, won't get pasted into the bug as a followup.
This of course, only affects a few well-known people using EVIL 
MAILERS(TM), and this feature should be considered part of the ongoing 
worldwide conspiracy to get them to move to a reasonable mailer.


--Dan