Re: Patchwork for glibc?

["Joseph S. Myers" <joseph at codesourcery dot com>]

On Fri, 14 Feb 2014, Ramana Radhakrishnan wrote:

> I'm quite tired as well of stale patches in mailboxes and the
> associated pain we have in all the communities. I've got a few ideas
> based on looking at some available tools like phabricator and
> reviewboard but I'm not in a position to have a meaningful discussion.

What I want from any system supporting patch review is:

* No need to use a special tool to submit a patch; patches can be sent 
with normal mail clients and so be in greppable form in one's sent mail 
folders.  (This does not say whether there could be some 
patch-tracking-submission email address that's CC:ed as well as the list, 
or whether patches could be sent to such an address that then sends them 
on to the list.)

* Patches, whether or not anyone uses some special tool to submit them, 
arrive in mailboxes in normal plain-text emails to the mailing list, so 
can be found through grep of mail folders from the list and are archived 
in all archives of the list.

* Patches can be reviewed in normal plain-text emails to the mailing list 
without any special tool being needed.  If someone uses some other tool to 
review a patch, this generates such an email, on the list, in the right 
thread, with meaningful context based on the reviewer's choice of which 
parts of the patch should be quoted in the review (not just quoting too 
little context, not just giving line numbers, not quoting the whole thing 
without trimming irrelevant pieces), so reviews can also be found through 
grep of mail folders to the list and are also archived in all archives of 
the list.

I believe patchwork achieves this by tracking whatever patches have gone 
to the list, regardless of what tools may have been used to send them.  It 
does need someone keeping an eye on the data and removing patches that 
have been committed, or reviewed and need revising.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com