[Sugar-devel] Bug tracking Vs Patch review

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 17:27, David Farning <dfarning at gmail.com> wrote:
> Over the past couple of months there have been a number of thread
> regarding patch management.  In reviewing the threads in preparation
> for herding a number of patches through the process, I notice that
> there seem to be two distinct workflows that are getting interchanged.
>
> Tracking Bugs vs Reviewing Patches
>
> Processing a patch via the bug tracker seems inappropriate.  There are
> two distinct differences between bugs and patches.
> 1.  Purpose.
>  A. Bug is a problem waiting for a solution.
>  B. Patch implements a change in code.  (It is a solution to a problem)
> 2. Owner.
>  A. Bug is owned by the maintainer -- It is generally accepted to be
> the module maintainers responibility to track bugs.
>  B. Patch is owned by the submitter -- It is generally accepted to be
> the patch submitters Responsibility to herd the patch up the to point
> it as been ACKed by the maintainer.
>
> The purpose of a patch review is to ensure that each patch is reviewed
> for quality and that each patch implements a change which is desirable
> to have in the mainline.  It is not a discussion about the best
> possible solution to a problem.  Most of the discussion to date has
> been centered around two points (a) syncing the bug tracker to the
> patch review process and (b) loosing patches.  If a patch is a
> solution to a problem it is not necessary to discuss the problem and
> if it is the patch submitters responsibility to track the patch the
> need for a maintainer to track the patch goes away.

Maybe I'm just misunderstanding (quite probable as I don't know if
something is being proposed nor what is the purpose of this thread),
but seems to me that these remarks could be useful:

- nobody has ever been forbidden to ask for reviews in the mailing list.

- everybody is welcome to help with triaging, reviewing, tracking patches, etc.

- several (most?) FOSS projects track patches in a bug tracker and
seem to thrive in contributions. Maybe they are wrong and we are
smarter, but we shouldn't assume they are all stupid.

- this whole bugtracker vs. mailing list issue may be a red herring
that we have come with to not have to deal with the real, harder
issues.

Regards,

Tomeu

> david
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