Idea: Patches-from-linus mailing list? (Was Re: Alan Cox quote? (was: Re: accounting for threads))

Rob Landley
2001-06-21T19:47:31Z

On Wednesday 20 June 2001 21:57, D. Stimits wrote:

> MySQL is just a sample. I mention it because it is quite easy to link a
> web server to. Imagine patch running on a large file that is a
> conglomeration of 50 small patches; it could easily summarize this, and
> storing it through MySQL adds a lot of increased web flexibility (such
> as searching and sorting). It is, however, just one example of a way to
> make "patch" become autodocumenting.

Not so much patch as a wrapper around patch. That's a good idea. A small
perl script would do it...

Right now, Linus makes a big file by appending mail messages to it. His
mailer is, in theory, putting mail headers at the start of each of these
messages (from, to, subject, and all that). At the end of the day, he feeds
that big file to patch and it applies all the patches he's read through and
decided he likes.

It should be fairly easy to make a wrapper around patch that splits out a
single mail message, feeds it to patch, and on some measurement of "success"
forwards it to an otherwise read-only mailing list. (Which can then have a
database based archiver subscribed to that list, if necessary.)

If Linus used such a beast, we could get the actual mail messages Linus is
applying patches from, as they're applied. Including any human readable
documentation in them that patch itself would discard. No more asking "did
patch such and such get applied, when, who was it from"...

And we get the extra patch granularity Linus himself is so keen on. Instead
of waiting for our weekly pre2-pre3 100k patch, we could follow the
individual ones as logically grouped changes, with subject lines saying what
the patch is about and everything.

And the people hankering to make a CVS tree out of LInux kernel development
would then have a much better checkin granularity to work with. :)

The main thing, though, is that done right, it's no extra burden on Linus.
(Which is kind of important if we ever hope to get him to use it. :)

Sound like an idea to anybody else?

Rob