[Buildroot] Worried about patches not being merged?

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>]

Angelo,

(Please don't use top-posting, top-posting is bad.)

On Thu, 19 Mar 2015 09:35:31 +0100, Angelo Compagnucci wrote:

> The first on is the impossibility to prioritize patches to be
> reviewed. Nobody really cares to go to months old threads only to find
> an important patch passed unobserved. We should have a way to tag that
> patch as high/low priority just at the time of arrival, so reviewers
> could choose in a pool of important patches. This way the project
> could add important features and bug fixes more easily.
> To me, it's not that important that my new shiny sysdig package will
> enter buildroot in a couple of major releases, it's more important to
> have the makedevs recursive option applied cause it's really a killer
> feature (this is only an example from my backlog).

Indeed, patchwork could offer more features to "classify" patches.
There are some big series like the SELinux stuff or the per-package
staging directory that are really "advanced/in-progress" work that
isn't at the same level as many other patches in the list.

Patchwork is an open-source project, the code base is pretty small and
easy, so feel free to contribute improvements!

> The second one is to have the ability to comment patches directly on
> web. Nobody wants to dig his email client looking for that two months
> old thread to be reviewed. Having a simple way to comment on web could
> accelerate patch review considerably, cause I can filter patches
> matching a certain criteria and review them one by one. I can choose
> to review patches from older to younger, or patches that pertain to my
> field of knowledge.

On this one however I believe you'll face the opposition of many of the
old timers, who are very much used to e-mail based review. I do think
that e-mail based review encourages more people to review because
everyone gets to see the review e-mails, it's not buried deep in an
obscure web interface.

And anyway, what are the available options? The Gerrit web interface is
absolutely terrible, it's a huge mess of buttons/links all over the
place, totally unusable IMO.

What you could do however, since patchwork has the complete e-mails, is
create a "Reply" button next to each patch in patchwork, that would
open up the patch and format a reply to it so that you can review the
patch. This would at least simplify the process of finding back in your
e-mail client the relevant e-mail (which, to be honest, isn't that
complicated: just copy/paste the Subject of the patch as given by
patchwork into your e-mail client, and it'll return you just that one
patch).

Also, often people complaining about e-mail and wanting to use
web-based stuff instead is because their e-mail client or e-mail setup
in general sucks. Do you have a good and efficient e-mail client? If
you don't, then the issue might be here.

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com