Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Recruitment (Reviewers, Testers, Maintainers, Hobbyists)

[Bjorn Helgaas <bhelgaas@google.com>]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 9:34 AM, Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net> wrote:
> On 07/08/2015 07:20 AM, Bjorn Helgaas wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 7:50 PM, Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net> wrote:
>>
>>> ... In once recent case, where I did spend the time,
>>> and I thought the maintainer had agreed to accept the patch, I ended up
>>> getting an automated patchwork email telling me that the patch was
>>> deferred indefinitely. Not really encouraging either.
>>
>> Hmm, I use patchwork, but I don't have any idea what it looks like on
>> the submitter's side.  If it generates discouraging emails, that's bad
>> news to me.  I change the state of lots of patches because (a) they
>> were cross-posted and I expect another maintainer to deal with them,
>> (b) they have been superseded, (c) there have been reviews that
>> require a respin, etc.  I'm not very careful about the actual state
>> because from my point of view, all the states do the same thing:
>> remove the patch from my to-do list.
>>
>> I wish I knew how to use patchwork better, or had a smarter workflow
>> that could comprehend a series as a single entity.  Patchwork is a lot
>> of clicking, but I don't know anything better.
>
> Wasn't you (in case you think so), and I don't think it is a problem that
> patchwork sends e-mail. The problem in this case was that the maintainer
> seemed to suggest that he would accept the patch before deferring it.
> At that point I gave up pushing for it.
>
> Now, if you set a bug to "deferred" state because you intend to pick it
> up for the next release, that would be different and might in fact be
> considered discouraging, unless you let the submitter know what is going on.

That's one thing I don't like about patchwork: there's no way that I
know of to annotate the state change.  I'd like a way to change the
state to "Changes requested" along with a pointer to the relevant
email.  Or to "Not applicable" along with a pointer to the other tree
I expect it to go through.

It'd be nice if one could include patchwork directives in an email,
the way you can with the Debian bug tracker.

Bjorn