Re: Patch queue management systems

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 12/09/2014 10:44 PM, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen wrote:

> They're included for a few weeks.  `x' to make them go away.

Thanks.

> Well, that's also nice, but for virtually all patches we get (which are
> to the Lisp bits), running a "make" in the current tree is sufficient to
> see whether the patch is whack or not.  No need to wait for a result
> from an integration server.

Quite the opposite, many bugs with Lisp code can only be found at 
runtime. One has to try hard to break the compilation.

Anyway, you previous message gave me an impression that you do want an 
integration server. You don't? Okay...

> ("make test" if you want to be all modern and hang with the cool kids.)

Right.

> > Do you intend to keep the patch submission workflow the same?
> > I.e. free-form (inline or in an attachment with arbitrary name),
> > instead of a Git branch somewhere.
>
> Sending patches is really easy, even for kids these days.

This ignores the point I was making. To make it easier for automated 
tools, you'd have to make sending patches *harder*, at least a bit, for 
the uninitiated.

> > It increases visibility into the discussion. Even if we're only
> > talking two passes, being able to see just the comments that apply to
> > the latest proposed version is pretty nice.
>
> Yes, it would be, but we're displaying the discussion threaded, so that
> kinda happens naturally.

That's not ideal: only one message's contents is displayed at the time, 
and when reading, one has to go up and down the thread, until they find 
the message that submits the patch, and then switch between the messages 
in the subthread which appear to respond to it. There's no other way to 
follow the discussions on each specific part of the patch, except to 
look at the quotes in each message and try to keep it together in your head.

With inline comments, you can have granular comment threads that only 
apply to specific part of the patch.

> It would be nice to have a way to mark exactly
> what message contains the most current version of the patch, though.

Even that would be an improvement, yes.