Patchwork (was Re: Governance revisited)

[Troy Rollo]

On Tuesday 26 September 2006 22:55, Jeremy White wrote:

>     1.  We can write a utility that lets us compare a winehq commit
>         message to a wine-patches email and see if there is a 'match'.
>         100% isn't required, but some nice non zero number is.
>
>         A key requirement is that there are near zero false hits.

This (and point 2) is similar to what the Patchwork author is thinking of 
doing anyway. I was hoping to achieve something a little more than that by 
providing something that might actually streamline Alexandre's processes and 
so make it attractive to move to.

What might be good is if we could get a vncrec 
<http://www.sodan.org/~penny/vncrec/> file showing a typical patch review and 
application session. If we could get one within the next 24 hours, I could 
take it away and document the process by Tuesday, together with indicating 
any areas where the process could be improved by a new system.

> I guess it's the latter point that is key.  We can automate
> some of this, but in the end, some human monitoring will be
> required.

However one principle should be that to the maximum extent possible, the 
system should *trigger* a reaction rather than just hoping somebody takes an 
action.

> But I should point out I'm not rushing to volunteer to write
> the daemon or revise Patchwork or actually do any useful work...

It's in Perl anyway, best left to Perl hackers. Other people tend to go insane 
working on Perl code, and then they *become* Perl hackers. (On the other hand 
it's fairly small now so a rewrite in some other language is feasible if 
necessary).