Patchwork (was Re: Governance revisited)

[Vitaliy Margolen]

Ge van Geldorp wrote:
>> From: Mike McCormack [mailto:mike at codeweavers.com] 
>>
>> Seems like that is a system that doesn't scale well at all, 
>> as it requires Alexandre to specifically respond to each and 
>> every patch.
> 
> No, it doesn't require that. It requires *someone* to respond, that could be
> a fellow developer on wine-devel. A comment added via the web interface or a
So in a sense you will require some one to respond for any incoming
e-mail to wine-patches. And if no one does, Alexandre don't get to see
the status? What if he already applied the patch? Now you slowing down
what would have worked just fine before.

> For the automatic status update to work, we would need to make an automatic
> connection between wine-devel messages and the patch, could be done using
> the In-Reply-To header or making sure each message sent out on wine-patches
> has a unique ID in its subject, a reply to that message would (in most email
> clients) copy the subject including the unique ID.
Ok now you making it dependant on an e-mail client. Yet that's exactly
what we are trying avoid with GIT.

> In the end, when the number of developers grows, the number of reviewers
> grows too (every developer is a potential reviewer). Seems to scale pretty
> well actually.
Not really. You can't make some one to review something that don't
understand. Or if they are busy/on vacation/away from PC/etc. So in the
end you'll end up with either huge queue that no one wants to touch. Or
a "clean up" jobs that will once in a while go and mark all patches as
old and will require authors to resubmit. How's that better then what we
use now?

>> It also seems like it encourages patch submitters to not 
>> polish their patches themselves and just submit a higher 
>> volume of low quality patches for Alexandre to review, since 
>> the onus will then be on him to respond.
> First of all, I don't see the encouragement and secondly, how does the
> current system prevent that?
When people well send out right hacks and expect some one to tell then
what they really should do. Current system allows to no waste any time
on such craft.

>> The current system, which leaves the responsibility for the 
>> patch with the submitter both scales better, and encourages 
>> patch submitters to think about their patches more.
> I'm not sure why you think responsibility for the patch would shift. It
> would still be the authors responsibility to write acceptable code. The only
> thing that would change is that the author gets feedback at the earliest
> possible moment, be it from the bot, peer review or Alexandre.
No, by requiring some one to respond you making them responsible (at
least until they respond). Of course responses like "sucks" wouldn't be
nice, so some one who does understand the subject will have to spend
their time to understand the patch, write a review of the patch and send
it. And you want that ASAP! Which means whenever patch arrives in
wine-patches some one (most likely more then one person) will stop
everything they are doing, and start writing a review?

Vitaliy