[Gnu-arch-users] Re: patch trackers

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Tom" == Tom Lord <address@hidden> writes:

    Tom> Sure.  I don't mean to impose "make a decentralizing
    Tom> influence" as the primary design constraint.

I don't _think_ I do either ... but it's important enough that I wanna
say "uh, let me get back to you on that!"

    Tom> One obvious question is just what exactly kind of "cross
    Tom> linkage" are we talking about?  That's an aspect of the the
    Tom> more general question "What exactly does a patch tracker
    Tom> track"?

Well, as I mentioned earlier, AFAICT both Windows XP and Cygwin are
currently destabilizing influences on free software for the Windows
platform.  What I found out a day or so ago is that there are a
handful of patches at Cygwin that matter to XEmacs (and both of our
active Windows gurus were missing one or more of the issues the other
knew about), and that there is a currently XEmacs-specific Cygwin
feature (/dev/mswindows) whose stability is currently not well known.

So I would like to be able to subscribe _our_ issue tracker to the
nosy lists of those Cygwin issues.  Global namespace and all that, but
I also think that the browser-style interface is going to have to go.
(That doesn't mean people won't use browsers, just that human-oriented
browsers will be layered over something more formal and abstract.)

    Tom> I just think he's not on the critical path in the sense that
    Tom> distributions tend to get ahead of him on this or that
    Tom> feature and (don't they?) display features that propogate
    Tom> other than through him?

They certainly claim such things.

    Tom> Linus says: "Ok, here is 2.6" and everybody with pending
    Tom> patches has to figure out whether they still apply, whether
    Tom> they're remembered or dropped, etc.  A patch tracker can
    Tom> automate much more of that -- what we currently have is a lot
    Tom> of people doing patch-tracker bookkeeping by hand.

This could be done by third-parties rather than by Linus ... but their
clients would have to worry that Linus would drop their patches simply
on the signal that they were automatically managed.  ;-)

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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