[Pixman] Announcement: Patchwork for Pixman

[Pekka Paalanen]

Hi all,

as I promised a long time ago, probably in IRC, Patchwork for Pixman is
now up:
http://patchwork.freedesktop.org/project/pixman/list/

It has been there for a while, but only recently it was cleaned up from
old patch submissions. A huge thank-you to Oded Gabbay for the
clean-up, and to Daniel Stone for setting Patchwork up and seeding it.

We seeded Patchwork with emails from the Pixman mailing list starting
from January 2014. Oded then marked the patches that were already
merged or superseded etc. The list should be fairly up-to-date now.

The major idea is, that we have a public list of patches in need of
review. People who happen to stroll in do not have to dig through piles
and piles of email archives to find out which patches need review, but
they can just pick some from the list that look interesting to them.


How does it work?

Patches are sent to the pixman mailing list as always. Patchwork
listens on the list, and automatically records any new patches.

Unfortunately, at least for now, Patchwork does not detect
re-submissions or revisions, so those need to be updated manually. This
is where I hope help from all submitters: when your patch gets re-sent,
please update the status.

There is one more bit of automation: when a commit gets pushed into the
upstream git repository, a git hook will run that searches for the
patch in Patchwork. If it finds a match (the patch content must match
exactly, commit message does not matter), it marks the one patch as
"accepted". The person pushing to git will see messages from this git
hook, and will know if Patchwork was updated.

There is one catch with the git hook, though. If an identical patch has
been submitted multiple times, it will mark only the oldest as
accepted, leaving the rest. As I've heard Intel may be pushing
Patchwork forward, perhaps this will get fixed eventually.

That's it. Reviews and everything happen still just like they used to.

I hope this will help a tiny bit with the Pixman maintenance.


More details:

There are also other projects using (or some ignoring) Patchwork:
http://patchwork.freedesktop.org/
At least Wayland is actively using it for Wayland and Weston, which is
how I am familiar with Patchwork.

Normally a registered used is only able to change the status of his own
patches. However, I can give project maintainer rights in Patchwork for
people who want it, which means they will be able to update anyone's
patch status.

The default filter for that patch list is "Action Required", which
matches patches with "new" or "under review", I think. Note, that
"Awaiting Upstream" does not count as "Action Required", not sure why.

"Accepted" means landed in upstream git. Rejected, superseded and
others should be obvious.

My personal habit is that a patch that is not listed by the default
filter does not need any work from reviewers, so I don't see any reason
to update e.g. "superseded" to something else.

I'll be happy to answer any questions. :-)


Thanks,
pq