Re: Patchwork patch tracking system

Tom Tromey
2014-05-21T14:47:52Z

Tom> I've been trying the patchworks install as well. I don't find it all
Tom> that useful myself, but maybe it would be better if more people were
Tom> using it.

Let me walk that back a little.

I've been trying it again and it is useful. I've been using it every
day.

At the very least it gives us a global list of what has not been
reviewed. And, the patchwork command-line client seems quite nice;
"pwclient git-am" seems truly useful, though I haven't had cause to use
it yet.

A few things would make it nicer for use with gdb:

1. If it knew about patch series. Right now it drops (the usually quite
useful) "patch 0" mail and treats each patch as a separate entity.

I looked at the patchwork mailing list and while this topic has come
up, nobody has implemented the needed features.

2. Building on #1, if it could tell when a patch series obsoletes an
older series.

I think this would work best with patch series support, because it's
common when resubmitting for patches to change their subject and
otherwise be "untrackable", whereas we could easily adopt a
convention that the new series have the same title for the cover
letter.

3. If it ignored "FYI" patches. This step could be applied after #2 so
that the final courtesy copy would zap the old series from the UI.

4. If we ran the existing patchwork automatic zapper regularly so that
commits could remove patches from the UI.

One final thing that would be useful is if a mention of a PR in a
gdb-patches mail caused some note to be posted to Bugzilla -- ideally a
link to the email in our archives, but a link to the appropriate entry
in patchwork would be an acceptable substitute.

Tom