Re: Public patch penguin

[Dave Jones <davej@suse.de>]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2002 at 12:56:21PM -0500, Drew P. Vogel wrote:

 > Would there be any interest in a web site which hosts copies of all
 > current patches, while providing a way to rate the patches and leave
 > comments (a simplified freshmeat.net with only kernel patches).

 It's been done before with various levels of success. Some would
 like it, others (myself included) would likely not use it.
 I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Any tool which requires
 me to start up a web browser to do something productive is a major
 nuisance.

 > This would help facilitate the network of trust/cooperation Linus and others
 > have suggested. Aside from the 10-20 people Linus works directly with, he
 > and other maintainers could work with the site as the site will be a
 > decent filter between Linus and the public. If 95% of users have a certain
 > patch working without trouble against a particular tree, then the question
 > first raised in this email becomes "very little".

 I like the sounds of some of it. Take for example Andrew Mortons recent
 ide-cd DMA patch. I was curious about how that worked out for people,
 so I kept the whole thread. If at some point it's a candidate for
 inclusion in my tree, I can open mutt, look in the January l-k folder,
 and see the whole thread with success/failure stories, and see how it
 worked out..
 A correctly indexed patch repository could also duplicate this, but
 not replace it. I do a lot of patch-hoovering scooping up mislaid
 dropped patches from l-k archives when I'm on the road with no
 network connection, or sitting around in hotel rooms watching bad
 german television. For this reason, the www is a non-starter for me
 unless I have some means of mirroring the whole repository and comments.
 (which isn't too practical).

-- 
| Dave Jones.        http://www.codemonkey.org.uk
| SuSE Labs