[PATCH wayland] Contributing: explain Patchwork

[Bryce Harrington]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 10:30:48AM +0300, Pekka Paalanen wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Sep 2015 09:22:27 +0300
> Pekka Paalanen <ppaalanen at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 21 Sep 2015 12:31:21 -0700
> > Bryce Harrington <bryce at osg.samsung.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 10:41:59AM +0300, Pekka Paalanen wrote:
> > > > From: Pekka Paalanen <pekka.paalanen at collabora.co.uk>
> > > > 
> 
> > > > +The following patch states are found in Patchwork:
> > > > +
> > > > +  New
> > > > +	Patches under discussion or not yet processed.
> > > > +
> > > > +  Under review
> > > > +	Mostly unused state.
> > > 
> > > Currently we have a dozen patches marked Under review...
> > > 
> > > I wonder if we could make better use of this state.
> > 
> > We have marked, yes. I'm not sure what we gain from it. What could it
> > mean? Could it be "someone gave R-b, but needs more reviews to be
> > accepted?"
> > 
> > I think "someone started commenting on this" isn't as useful, or is it?
> 
> Or could it perhaps mean "this patch requires of comment from a
> specific person", regardless whether that person has started to look at
> it yet?

That seems to be closest to how it's being used currently.  Or for
reviewers to mark patches they don't want to see landed until they've
signed off on it (although, not sure PW is the ideal place to record
that...)

I don't know or have a strong opinion on how Under Reviewed could be
used.  It just seems to me that it's a "free" status tag we could put to
use to help improve our processes.

One thought is that if we want to be more encouraging of patch
submitters to check patchwork for their patch status, then Under Review
could be useful as a way to indicate something meaningful about where it
is in the process.

That may sound silly, but consider that our process is basically:

  1.  New and unreviewed
  2.  Reviewed
  3.  ...
  4.  Ready to be landed
  5.  Accepted

and looking at our patch backlog, it appears we have a LOT of patches in
that step #3.  I don't know what the solution here is, but I can't help
thinking that by giving some better visibility there it should help move
things along, or at least quell some worry by patch authors...

(Admittedly, we also have a problem with too many patches being in step
#1, but the solution there is pretty straightforward.  And also it might
be useful (to me at least) to have a better way to flag patches that are
at state #4; but I am hopeful when we get the new patchwork, some of the
new features will help address this.)

> We also have the "delegate" setting, which seems to allow only for
> Patchwork Wayland maintainers. Using the delegate for "this particular
> person's acceptance is required" seems fitting, no? We can easily add
> such people as Pathwork maintainers and there's no reason not to.

Agreed.

> In fact, I just added Tanibata-san as Patchwork maintainer, which
> allowed me to set the delegate for Emre Ucan's patches to ntanibata.
> Tanibata-san's acceptance is required for these patches. I also set the
> state to Under review, because I know they are discussing things atm.,
> but I'm not sure if it should be New instead. I moved them out of
> Deferred, since master is open for development again.

Yep, all sounds good.

I didn't use Deferred much this release, but only because the quantity
of backlogged patches was a bit overwhelming.

> Cc'ing Jonas, since this is tangentially relevant to the protocol dev
> proposal.
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> pq

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