[Piglit] Weekly 10 Picks from Patchwork for review and friendly reminder to clean out your old patches

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Sun, 21 Jun 2015 23:16:40 +0200
Marek Olšák <maraeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 10:12 PM, Jose Fonseca <jfonseca at vmware.com> wrote:
> > On 19/06/15 20:45, Ilia Mirkin wrote:
> >>
> >> On Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 3:39 PM, Jose Fonseca <jfonseca at vmware.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> On 19/06/15 13:32, Timothy Arceri wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> Hi all,
> >>>>
> >>>> Unfortunately since its introduction patchwork hasn't seen a lot of love
> >>>> in the Piglit and Mesa projects so I thought I'd try something out to
> >>>> bring it out of the shadows and into the limelight.
> >>>>
> >>>> The idea is simple we have many useful but long forgotten patches
> >>>> sitting on the mailing list that would serve us much better sitting in
> >>>> the git repo, so once a week I (or anyone else that wants to help out)
> >>>> would pick 10 seemingly random older patches that could do with a
> >>>> review/update/etc.
> >>>>
> >>>> I'm hoping this will help with both clearing out the backlog of patches
> >>>> and getting people thinking about patchwork.
> >>>>
> >>>> I'm interested in feedback on what people think about this idea.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> Patchwork seems to fail to recognize submited patches.  Eg. one of my
> >>> patches is https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/51379/ but it has been
> >>> commited on
> >>>
> >>> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/piglit/commit/?id=540972b46e51ee1d4acbb3757b731a066e2b6ba5
> >>>
> >>> Why is that?
> >>
> >>
> >> It's very strict about matching patches. The diff has to be identical.
> >> Which it often isn't if you made minor changes, or rebased, or
> >> whatever.
> >
> >
> > Without a bit of fuzzy matching I'm afraid this looks a bit hopeless to me:
> >
> > I believe the bulk of the patches are committed, and only a few is
> > forgotten.  Looking at the patchwork backlog it's fair to say a large
> > portion of those committed don't get detected due to small changes.  So the
> > end result is that developers have to click through and babysit the bulk of
> > their changes in patchwork, so that the few truly forgotten patches get to
> > stand out?
> >
> > I don't think this will ever going to work.  There's no incentive in the
> > system for the most prolific developers to spend so much of their time, for
> > the sake of the occasional contributor.  The patchwork system seems bound to
> > echo what happens on the mailing list: their patches get to be lost twice...
> 
> I couldn't agree more.
> 
> Every day, I have to decide what the best way to spend my time is. And
> patchwork is not it. There are so many patches in patchwork I don't
> care about that it's tedious to find ones that I do care about.

I bet most people think like that, which means most people just ignore
Patchwork, the lists in Patchwork get out of date, which makes you
think its far too much effort to deal with Patchwork. *shrug*

> I keep track of patches and issues that interest me using the gmail
> "stars". That has worked very well for me and it helps me to never
> forget anything. I do ignore a lot of emails though, including 99% of
> the piglit mailing list.
> 
> If you want to get my attention, Cc me or mention my first name.

That is all cool for your personal needs, and assuming people know to ping
you. But do you ever review patches not explicitly pointed to you
(would you want to, easily)?

My experience with Patchwork is with Wayland/Weston, which surely has
less traffic than Mesa. Before Patchwork, the only record of patches
needing review was unread email on the mailing list. That doesn't work,
because for anyone to see a status change to a patch, you have to read
the replies. There is enough traffic to make that infeasible even for
Wayland/Weston. Everyone has to do that on their own as there is no
common tracking. And so most people can't bother. At that time, the
only tracker of patches needing review was my personal email folder,
which obviously doesn't scale at all and put an immense stress on me
personally.

Getting Patchwork up *and used* for Wayland/Weston was a huge
improvement over nothing. Now we actually know what hasn't been
reviewed and what are the latest revisions of patches so you don't go
reviewing something that was superseded. Patchwork is not perfect nor
effortless, but while waiting for the perfect infrastructure to appear,
it helps a lot if you don't let it rot.

I think I can provide project admin rights for people in Patchwork, so
they can update the patch status of anyone's patches. I've never done
it for Mesa or Piglit yet, but for Wayland yes. Feel free to ask me,
I'll see about it when I can.

Btw. another cave-eat with Patchwork's git hook for marking patches
Accepted is that it marks the first submission of a patch. If the patch
has been re-sent as is, the following copies are not updated. Paying
attention to those git-push messages helps you to keep Patchwork clean,
and date seems to be a nice key for finding a particular patch for
manual update.


Thanks,
pq