Patch review/application process

[Daniel Schoepe]

On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 18:29:37 +0000, Jani Nikula <jani at nikula.org> wrote:
> The good thing is, there are contributions and review. The bad thing is,
> unless you've hung around long enough, you don't know if the reviewers
> are people whose comments you should really pay attention to or not, and
> either way, fixing the patches seems pointless and frustrating if they
> don't get applied anyway.
> 
> A MAINTAINERS file might be helpful in identifying some of the key
> people. AUTHORS could be updated to include people with not
> insignificant contributions.

I agree, that sounds like a good idea.

> If the problem is lack of time, I'm not sure if setting up and
> maintaining some world facing web service would help things.

This idea was mainly intended to prevent patches from being forgotten,
an issue not entirely orthogonal to the main point.

> > - Some kind of "voting system" that gets a patch applied if some
> >   number of "trusted" contributors reviewed a patch and think it is
> >   good. I haven't given this idea much thought and I guess it might
> >   lead to a "lack of direction / guiding principles" in the development
> >   of notmuch.
> 
> I wouldn't put too much emphasis on creating a voting system or a
> process. I do have hopes for the tag sharing mechanism helping in
> tracking the reviewed patches, though. That means figuring out whose
> tags to trust anyway.

Yes, I didn't envision some process that's formalized down to every
detail, but more of a general guideline like "if at least n people out
of {set of trusted contributors} agree and there's no controversy about
the patch, anyone with commit access is allowed to apply the patch". I
think this idea would help mainly with getting small patches like [1]
applied more quickly.

[1] id:"1309890780-8214-1-git-send-email-pieter at praet.org"

Cheers,
Daniel
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