[Qemu-devel] Improving patch tracking - something like gerrit?

[Mark Cave-Ayland <mark.cave-ayland@ilande.co.uk>]

Hi all,

It should be fairly evident to most people that the volume of patches 
flowing through the qemu-devel mailing list is continually increasing, 
and it is becoming increasingly difficult to track which patches have 
been applied over time. This is particularly a problem where patchsets 
have dependencies on other patchsets which haven't yet been applied to 
git master, which can then cause merge conflicts due to length of time 
taken for the final series to be merged.

Is it time for QEMU to start looking at tools such as gerrit to help 
manage this process? There seems to be an increasing number of ping 
requests for outstanding patches (including my own) which don't get 
applied for weeks, and often even months because they target less 
popular platforms/subsystems and so don't always get the attention of 
the committers.

What I would like to see from such a tool would be something that would 
enable me to see which patches are being considered for each release, so 
that I can see if a particular patch I have submitted is being ignored, 
rejected or deferred to a future release.

Note that I think that one of the biggest benefits of such a tool would 
be during feature freeze, whereby the mailing list contains an avalanche 
of future and current PULL requests which have to be manually filtered 
by committers. This would help both developers and committers see what 
patches are definitely scheduled for the next release as opposed to 
patches being rejected at the last minute because the PULL request 
failed just before the release deadline.

Does anyone else have any thoughts/ideas as to how to better manage this 
process, particularly for a project like QEMU where the number of 
patches is considerably greater than the number of reviewers/committers?


ATB,

Mark.