Re: [Summit topic] Improving reviewer quality of life (patchwork, subsystem lists?, etc)

From: "Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>
To: Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>, git@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [Summit topic] Improving reviewer quality of life (patchwork, subsystem lists?, etc)
Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2021 00:06:06 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <211023.861r4ck8jw.gmgdl@evledraar.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20211021134105.ziqmcknnpdsg6cvc@meerkat.local>

On Thu, Oct 21 2021, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 21, 2021 at 01:57:11PM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
>>  2. Dscho said he’s not able to follow everything on the mailing list
>> 
>>     1. if you have just one patch you send, reply-all works okay
>> 
>>     2. mailing list works reasonably well if you’re someone like Junio, working
>>        on it full time, has good mail filters, keeps up to date with everything
>> 
>>     3. If you’re in-between, does not work well
>
> This is a problem that's not actually unique to mailing lists. If you have any
> project that is popular enough, at some point it reaches critical mass where
> developer/user feedback becomes too much for anyone to keep up. Github
> projects aren't immune to this either, but they do have a benefit of providing
> an easy interface for someone to apply categorization to issues/discussions.

I'd like to use this mail as a good jump-off point to link to my "how"
v.s. "what" E-Mail from when this was last discussed. I think I
mentioned it in passing at the recent summit:

https://lore.kernel.org/git/87fszd3xo0.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com/

Especially as...

>>     13. Junio: Not really. The extra tracking conversations are not as
>>         important to me. I think it’s a feature that if someone requests a
>>         feature and nothing happens for a while that it no longer produces
>>         overhead for people is a useful feature. That kind of old filtering
>>         feature is sometimes valuable.
>
> I find that if there's no mailing list integration, then bugzilla generally
> rots after the initial person getting the bug reports moves on. Then bugs
> reported via bugzilla just sit there without anyone paying attention. At least
> when bug reports get sent to the list, the ensuing discussions get reflected
> in both the list archives and in bugzilla.

...it makes a passive mention to this "forgetting as a feature" aspect
of not having a bug tracker.

>
>>     16. I’m also happy to work with kernel.org admins to get this set up for us
>>         if that’s what we want
>
> Consider this part done. :)

And thank you for your contribution to kernel.org infrastructure.