patchzilla idea

[Joe Walker]

On 29/03/2011 07:41, Max Kanat-Alexander wrote:
> On 03/28/2011 10:39 AM, Joe Walker wrote:
>> With all the talk about process in dev.planning I thought it might be
>> worth jotting down a few ideas wrt patch management that I've been
>> mulling on for a while.
>> http://etherpad.mozilla.com:9000/patchzilla
> 	Cool. Let me say first that I'm glad that you posted this, it's
> interesting that you're thinking about these problems, and I'm really
> happy that you're proposing a creative solution to the community. I
> totally agree that there are a lot of things that could be better here,
> and anywhere that automation can make a developer's life easier, it should.
>
> 	With all that said, I have to admit that I'm pretty skeptical about
> this, and here's why:
>
> 	Mostly, I think that the problems you're posing are actually people who
> are mis-using their bug-tracker. "Work on 2 bugs in the same file" is
> probably not a good development process or use of Bugzilla. Fixing
> multiple bugs on one "bug" in Bugzilla is also not a good idea, just
> from an organization and process-sanity perspective. Having multiple
> separate patches that all combined "fix" one bug is also somewhat
> questionable--that seems like a situation where there should be blockers
> filed and each patch should go onto a separate blocker. In short, with
> the "one bug == one problem == one patch" rule, most of this becomes
> unnecessary.

We have some crossed wires here. Suppose:

  main()  {
      printf("helo, wrld");
  }

Along with 2 bugs:
#1: Hello is spelled incorrectly
#2: World is spelled incorrectly

The patches for those bugs are necessarily dependent, however the bugs 
are not.


Also, I've seen several cases where the one problem == one patch rule 
has not worked in practice. There could be 2 alternative implementations 
of part of the solution, 2 distinct steps that are functionally 
distinct, etc.

> 	Also, I think that your solution mostly sounds like a duplicate of
> Review Board with some enhancements. I have already attempted to get
> support for integrating Review Board with Bugzilla, but the direction
> that's being taken at Mozilla is to instead re-implement something very
> similar to Review Board as a Bugzilla Extension, Splinter. I'm not
> saying that that's a good idea, but I'm saying that having a separate
> system that tracks patches has already been sort of shot down (although
> not explicitly).

This was born out of a discussion in which all sorts of sacred cows were 
being slaughtered. Including 'move everything to github' and so on. It 
was an attempt to have a more manageable jump!

It came up that the webkit bugzilla does some commit work. Does anyone 
know more about this? Are there webkit people around here?

Joe.