improvement to patchwatcher

[Dan Kegel]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 2:08 AM, Alexandre Julliard <julliard at winehq.org> wrote:
> I think it would be quite useful. For instance it would allow sending a
> nice reminder to the author to rethink/resend their patch if it hasn't
> been applied after a week or so. It would also enable me (and other
> reviewers) to always get an up-to-date list of patches that need to be
> looked at, instead of having to keep track of it locally.
>
> Of course that would also require other ways to take patches off the
> list, for instance when an updated patch has been sent, or when someone
> else fixed the bug differently. I certainly agree it's not trivial to
> implement.

Many people have tried implementing patch trackers
(e.g. Danny Berlin did a simple one,http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GCC_Patch_Tracking)
but they don't seem to survive long, so doing a useful one must
be a challenge.

It would be hard to recognize later versions of the same patch,
even with the '(try 2)' convention, since they often get split
and munged while being beaten into submission.
So Patchwatcher would have to have a way for developers to
manually mark old patchsets as obsolete.

Most developers probably wouldn't bother unless this was
really, really easy.   I can't imagine that happening unless,
say, we start requiring patches to be submitted via a secure
web interface that verifies that the author has signed the Wine
Contributors Agreement etc.  At which point it wouldn't be
too hard to coax developers into clicking a box saying
"obsoletes this old patchset".  But that'd be a pretty big change in
wine's workflow.
- Dan