From: David Bremner <david@tethera.net>
To: Martin Owens <doctormo@gmail.com>,
	Notmuch developer list <notmuch@notmuchmail.org>
Subject: Re: Patches, Developers and Training
In-Reply-To: <1315968415.2201.8.camel@delen>
References: <1315968415.2201.8.camel@delen>
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Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2011 07:34:12 -0300
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On Tue, 13 Sep 2011 22:46:55 -0400, Martin Owens <doctormo@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm not sure what the exact process is, but I imagine you're using some
> kind of tool similar to launchpad's merge request functionality that
> allows you to see branches for merging (or in this case patches).
> 

We're not really using any system, which is part of the problem, but to
be honest probably only a small part of the problem. The real underlying
problem is that Carl has able to devote notmuch time to notmuch lately,
and we have not adapted to that.

The good news is that some technical solution might help a little.  If
you were keen to work on a bug tracking system, that would be great in
my view.  Currently I think most of the patch tracking state is
contained in tags in Carl's mailbox.  If you start at
id:"87boya98sf.fsf@gogo.home" you can find some discussion about tag
sharing. I personally think this is the way forward, although I'm
agnostic about the implementation details.  It occured to me that a
simpler (?) system might to use git to merge a shared set of tags. Then
issues of access control, merging, and reverting could be done with git.
At least for me, that is quite comfortable.

As for why not existing bug tracking system $X, I think from past
discussions, we have agreed that having something that integrates well
with notmuch is pretty much a requirement, at least for Carl. There is a
patchwork instance limping along, but it seems to me to be roughly
equivalent to "notmuch search subject:patch and notmuch"; i.e. we have
that information already.

David