Wayland and Weston in Patchwork

[Pekka Paalanen]

Hi all,

some of you already know that we now have
http://patchwork.freedesktop.org/project/wayland/list/
to keep track of the patches sent to wayland-devel mailing list.

Thanks to Daniel for setting that up. :-)

We initialized the patch list with my review backlog. If you are
waiting for review on a patch, that is not for libinput, and you do not
see it listed in Patchwork at all (try disabling the filters too),
rebase and re-send it, please.


For contributors:

We have a filter, that prevents libinput patches from appearing on
patchwork, because libinput developers did not feel the need for it. I
seem to recall the filter works by looking at the email subject if it
contains "libinput" in the [subject-prefix].

Otherwise, all wayland, weston, and wayland-web patches should appear
on that list when they hit the mailing list. If you find that a patch
does not soon appear there while it does appear on the mailing list
archives[1], please send an email to me and Daniel (cc'd) because
something is wrong.

When you send patches to wayland-devel@, you can register your email
address in Pathwork, which allows you to manage the state of your own
patches. If you re-send or send revised versions of your patches, I
would hope you also take the time to mark your old patches in Patchwork
as "superseded" as appropriate.

You change the patch status by clicking the patch link in the list, and
on the following page you should have box titled "Patch Properties"
near the top. If you don't see that, you don't have permissions to
change it (e.g. not logged in, or unregistered email address).

If you want to become a Patchwork maintainer, i.e. have the rights to
change also other people's patch states, ask me or Daniel.

The old announcement of Patchwork for Mesa contains more information:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2013-November/049293.html
Just replace the "mesa" project name with "wayland" where needed.

It also includes a command line client for Patchwork.


For Wayland/Weston maintainers:

There is a git hook in place on the upstream repositories of Wayland
and Weston, that will automatically mark a patch in Patchwork as
"Accepted" if you push it to master unmodified. If you edit anything
except the commit message, the automatic update will likely fail and
you need to update the status manually.

When you do a push with successful automatic update, you see something
like:

$ git push origin master
Counting objects: 8, done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (8/8), done.
Writing objects: 100% (8/8), 1.46 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Total 8 (delta 7), reused 0 (delta 0)
remote: Updating patchwork state for http://patchwork.freedesktop.org/project/wayland/list/
remote: I: patch #34560 updated using rev 391820b0d6d9fcd99e12cd32623a476da64c89ce
remote: I: 1 patch(es) updated to state Accepted.
To ssh://git.freedesktop.org/git/wayland/wayland
   4a661c5..391820b  master -> master

When it fails, it will say so.


Shortcomings:

There are several features we would like to see in Patchwork but AFAIK
are not there (yet?). Patchwork does not recognize re-submissions so
that it could automatically set a patch as "Superseded". It does not
maintain patch sets. You can create "Bundles", but so far those are
just named collections of individual patches, and you need to create
them manually.

If you want to see only Wayland patches, or only Weston patches, etc.,
you need to set up a filter based on the patch subject, that relies on
everyone using the subject-prefix properly. Subject-prefix is not
always set like this, so the filtered lists will miss something. You
can configure the filters for the list in the blue header box, clicking
"Filters".

We are just starting to use Patchwork here, so we are still learning
the process. Even with its shortcomings, I believe Patchwork is an
improvement to the previous situation. At least the review backlog is
now public, and if we keep the list in Patchwork maintained, patches
will not get lost.

Yeah, we also broke the commit announcements through the irc bot while
getting this up, will see about fixing that.


Thanks,
pq

[1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/