RE: increasing the number of GCC reviewers

["Weddington, Eric" <Eric dot Weddington at atmel dot com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joseph S. Myers [mailto:joseph@codesourcery.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, June 09, 2009 6:51 PM
> To: Ian Lance Taylor
> Cc: Basile STARYNKEVITCH; GCC Mailing List
> Subject: Re: increasing the number of GCC reviewers
> 
> 
> At the human level I suspect it would help to have people who 
> watch for 
> submissions from non-regulars (including those attached to 
> Bugzilla) and 
> help them prepare patches following all the usual conventions 
> and get them 
> reviewed (checking for copyright assignments at an early 
> stage as needed) 
> and make sure the submissions don't get lost.  At the 
> technical level, 
> while submissions on gcc-patches take a wide variety of 
> forms, approvals 
> are more restricted; it ought to be possible for software to do a 
> reasonably good job of tracking which submissions have been 
> reviewed / 
> approved / committed (including noticing people trying to 
> submit patches 
> through Bugzilla), and of identifying the most likely 
> relevant maintainers 
> to review patches, aided by humans in keeping the data clean.

>From my experience having patches go to a mailing list is a sure way to have them get lost. When it goes into someone's inbox, it's likely to get pushed down, and "out of sight, out of mind" quickly. While the ML is archived, it is not as useful to search through as having a specific patch tracker/database, e.g. as found on SourceForge or Savannah projects. AFAIK the only gcc patch tracker being used is not used on a mandatory basis. 

While I'm not suggesting that gcc use SF/Savannah, it seems odd that gcc has a bug database, but no patch tracking database.