[notmuch] patchwork test instance (was: Git feature branch)

[martin f krafft]

I investigated some patch/issue trackers over the weekend. Here's my
summary/reply.

The executive summary is that
http://patchwork.madduck.net/project/notmuch/list/ now exists.
I have not really used it for anything real, so if some of you feel
inclined to give it a shot, sign up and triage away! Feedback
welcome.

also sprach James Rowe <jnrowe at gmail.com> [2010.01.28.2005 +1300]:
>   Roundup has command line and email interfaces.  The email interface is
> quite similar to debian's.  I've never used a launchpad hosted project
> so I can't compare it.

Roundup is an issue tracker, while Patchwork is a patch tracker.
They are fundamentally distinct, but there are overlaps. What led me
to go the Patchwork-path is that projects like the kernel and Git
don't use issue trackers but work entirely patch-based.

I don't know if that is the right way to do things, but having an
issue tracker that fills up with bugs and wishlist items lacking
patches is no better in the long run than not having an issue
tracker.

Arguably, being patch-centric means that a project has a higher
barrier of entry, but it also means that if someone wants something,
they know that they'll have to somehow end up with a patch. The way
this happens on Git is that you either write it yourself and bring
it up to discussion (which is what patchwork facilitates), or
constructively theorise the functionality until someone else
submits a patch.

>   Google's codereview tool has a nice interface for collecting and
> commenting on patches, but I suspect that suggestion will also meet with
> a degree of friction.  To me codereview feels like patchwork with
> polish.

Maybe you could take some ideas from codereview and inform the
patchwork people about them?

>   Both gitorious and github have commenting functionality built in.
> Commenting on commits in a fork is as easy as opening the commit in
> a browser.  I use something along the lines of the following script to
> open commits on github:
> 
>     #! /bin/sh
>     BASE=$(git config remote.${2:-origin}.url | sed 's,git\(@\|://\)\([^:/]*\)[:/]\(.*\).git,http://\2/\3/commit,')
>     COMMIT=$(git rev-parse ${1:-HEAD})
>     sensible-browser ${BASE}/${COMMIT}
> 
>   Using github or gitorious you can easily find and track forks from one
> place as well, which makes discovering new work much easier.  Github
> even provides a pretty single page interface to the work going on in
> other forks, gitorious requires a little more leg work to do the same
> but not much.

Git now has commit notes, but it doesn't seem like that's integrated
with Github/Gitorious.

Mind you, patchwork isn't integrated at all with Git. It should be
possible to set it up to automatically flag patches that are
accepted into mainline, next, or pu.

The benefit of patchwork is that discussion isn't moved to the web,
but patchwork hooks into the mailing list, so discussion can stay
where it should IMHO be.

>   For a couple of hosted projects we use at the office we email the
> individual entries from http://github.com/$user/$project/comments.atom
> to the mailing list so they're /forcibly/ seen by everybody :)

Right, but replying requires them to open a browser and be online at
the time, right?



Anyway, I suggest we give patchwork a try. It occurs to me that
notmuch can pretty much do all of what patchwork is doing — after
all, it's just tagging patches/threads, but until we have
synchronisable tags and a mailing list archive based on notmuch
(which could then replace patchwork), I think we'll need to employ
a third tool.

-- 
martin | http://madduck.net/ | http://two.sentenc.es/
 
"what's your conceptual continuity? --
 well, it should be easy to see:
 the crux of the bisquit is the apopstrophe!"
                                                        -- frank zappa
 
spamtraps: madduck.bogus at madduck.net
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