Ad-hoc notes from the "pending patches" BOF at the GNU tools cauldron.

[Dimitrios Apostolou]

Hi hp, thanks for the notes, I'm just going to highlight my point of view.

Regarding patch pinging, my take is that is should be seldom necessary, 
for example I tend to forget my small patches after sometime. So IMHO 
anyone replying anything is good, especially if he CCs the maintainer 
(Dodji-style :-). As you said, a get_maintainer script would come handy.

It's also the case that I often send RFC patches: patches with comments 
discussing a controversial idea, probably without changelog or regression 
testing. Sometimes I don't even CC anyone since I don't really expect a 
review, I only want to raise discussion.

Unfortunately such patches are 80% probable to be completely ignored. What 
do you think?

Finally, as I mentioned in the BOF it would be useful to be able to 
connect somehow the two patch management systems: bugzilla and ML. I'm not 
quite sure of the way, but here are the ideas:

* Automatically post bugzilla diffs to the ML, but then there is the 
problem of who answers where (hopefully not a problem if the automated 
mail has all subscribed to the bug CC'd).

* Have a field in the bugzilla keeping "related ML threads" URLs. What I 
do now is post a separate comment saying "discussed here" or "posted patch 
here". Not sure if good enough, but on bugs I've not seen it in cases I 
needed to.


Thanks,
Dimitris