patchzilla idea

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

On 03/29/2011 02:27 AM, Joe Walker wrote:
> #1: Hello is spelled incorrectly
> #2: World is spelled incorrectly
> 
> The patches for those bugs are necessarily dependent, however the bugs
> are not.

	Ah ha. I see what you are talking about, now. But those are really just
conflicts, not dependencies. They apply without fixing only if you
choose to do them in order, consciously. In that case, you could record
their blocking relationship in the bug tracker.

> 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.

	Okay. I'm sure there are such cases, but I would like to see some
specific ones. The examples you specified may not be the best:

	Two alternative implementations means that only one will be checked
in--that's not so much of a problem. It would avoid a certain number of
permutations in your auto-rebaser, but I don't know if it's a
common-enough situation to warrant a whole application.

	Two distinct steps should definitely be two bugs, perhaps linked back
to the original with the original being changed into a meta-bug.

> 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!

	Ah, okay. :-) I'm always for manageable jumps. :-) ("move everything to
github" is definitely bad idea in so many ways.) I suspect that patch
management may want to be a discussion you have with VCS vendors instead
of with us, though--I suspect they have developed far more tooling
around it than we would have even thought of.

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

	I'm not familiar with it, but I actually did want to extend the
bugzilla-vcs extension at some point to be able to commit patches for
you that are on bugs.

	-Max
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