Starting to track patches through bugzilla

[Wolfgang Bangerth]

I don't have much to say about the usefulness of tracking patches through 
bugzilla. However, I'd like to raise one concern:

Under no circumstances do I want patches to be tracked through the same 
component of bugzilla as bug reports. It took us about one year of hard work 
to clean out the database from old reports that are no longer valid, have 
never been looked at, etc. We would make all this effort useless if we 
started to open massive numbers of reports for patches that have been sent 
somewhere and that have subsequently been forgotten -- either because noone 
looked at them, because they were rejected, or because the submitter of the 
patch applied it without closing the bugzilla report. I don't want us 
bugmasters to be in a position where we have to start tracking down what 
happened to a certain patch just to keep the data base clean of reports that 
are no longer valid.

Remember that some of us (me including) do not know much about gcc's internals 
or its source code. So if I had a PR with a patch and had to decide what 
happened, I would either have to indulge into digging into code that I don't 
know, send emails to other people, or just give up. Neither is a particularly 
useful thing.

So I'd like to keep patches and bugs separate somehow for a while. If we're 
sure that the patch database works fine, then we can think about merging 
them, but I'd like to have a test phase first.

W.
 
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Wolfgang Bangerth              email:            bangerth@ices.utexas.edu
                               www: http://www.ices.utexas.edu/~bangerth/