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From: | Anthony Liguori |
Subject: | Re: [Qemu-devel] Fwd: Proposal: Improving patch tracking and review using Rietveld |
Date: | Thu, 27 Jan 2011 11:31:43 -0600 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.15) Gecko/20101027 Lightning/1.0b1 Thunderbird/3.0.10 |
On 01/27/2011 01:55 AM, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
Forwarding this from the GCC mailing list. Since patchwork isn't more than a mail archive the way it's implemented in QEMU, this may be a more interesting possibility.
Patchwork is a nice tool but I found a few issues with it that really deterred me from using it:
1) it's all or nothing in terms of whether maintainers use it. if everyone isn't on top of keeping it clean, you end up with a terrible backlog
2) it doesn't understand patches series. A 20 patch series gets applied all at once, yet you have to update status for each patch. That's annoying.
3) it doesn't understand new revisions of the same patch/series. This is really a deal breaker. Having to go and update the status particularly when you have patch series that see multiple revs in 24 hours creates an awful lot of work
PaoloAt Google we use a code review tool which was open sourced a couple of years ago: Rietveld (http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/rietveld.html). The best way of thinking about it is "bugzilla for patches". The system creates an entry for every patch submitted, provides a web tool for manipulating the patch (comments, different views of the diff, highlighting, etc) and it also has an email gateway. We have discussed patch tracking mechanisms in the past, and none so far has taken hold. The reason why I like Rietveld is that it doesn't really matter whether we all switch to using it at once: 1- Rietveld always send the patch sent to it to gcc-patches@ (provided the submitter added gcc-patches to the CC list). 2- The whole trail of discussion on the patch also get sent to gcc-patches and everyone else is CC'd in it. 3- Reviewers do not need to use the web tool to reply to the patch. One can simply respond to the e-mail, and it will get added to the patch discussion trail. So, for people who do not want to use the tool, Rietveld will not get in the way. They can simply respond to the patch as usual, and as long as they keep the rietveld email address in the CC list, the patch trail will be updated automatically. At Google we will start using Rietveld to send patches. The only difference folks will notice is that Rietveld-generated email has some extra text. I have created a wiki page that explains the basics of using Rietveld (thanks Jeffrey for the instructions): http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/rietveld
Interesting. This seems to have nice characteristics compared to patchworks.
Regards, Anthony Liguori
Once again, I'd like to underscore the fact that if a patch submitter chooses to use Rietveld for tracking their patches, this should not affect in any way the traditional mail-based review. All I ask is that reviewers maintain the CC and Subject line intact in order to not confuse the tool. Jeffrey, would you mind looking over the instructions I've written to make sure they're correct? Richard, this is the tool I mentioned in today's chat. Thanks. Diego.
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