Re: Wanted: Volunteer to code a Patchbot

Daniel Phillips
2002-02-01T08:01:59Z

On January 31, 2002 11:05 pm, Horst von Brand wrote:
> Stuart Young <sgy@amc.com.au> said:
>
> [...]
>
> > Possibly, but then it'll reply to the spammer and you'll get bounces left
> > and right. Perhaps it's a simple case that the patcher submitting will
> > have to have registered the email address before submitting their patch.
> > Only needs to be done once (not every time a patch is submitted, that's
> > mad!), and weeds out the noise.
>
> And then lkml will be swamped with questions as to why the automated patch
> system doesn't work, or it will just not be used at all because it is more
> work than just firing off a patch at lkml.

The plan is to have both open and registered-users-only patchbots. The
second kind is the kind to which maintainers themselves submit to, so the
forwarded stream of patches is guaranteed to come from trustworthy sources.
Maintainers themselves can configure their own patchbots to be open or closed
as they see fit. In essense, neither submitters not maintainers will see any
change at all in their procedures, except for the address to which they send
the patch.[1]

There will be a very significant change in the results of this process from
the submitter's point of view, since everybody will know where to look to see
what patches have been submitted, to whom, when, why etc.

There are a lot of things we can do with the patches once they're all sitting
in the patchbot's database, including tracking the state - applied, rejected,
being revised, etc. That's for later, the task at hand is simply to clarify
and streamline the lines of communication between submitters and maintainers.

[1] Submitters *may* chose to fill in a few lines of metadata in their patch
to specify, for example, a one-line description which is different from the
email subject, or that they are not interested in confirmation. Such
metadata is not required - the patchbots will accept patches in exactly the
format we are used to.

--
Daniel