[libvirt] Publishing libvirt 'patches' JSON database?

[Cole Robinson]

On 03/23/2016 11:34 AM, Kashyap Chamarthy wrote:
> I'd imagine most developers on this list have their own workflows to
> track/apply/test patches from the mailing list.  I normally just save
> patches in Mutt's Maildir and apply them manually to a Git branch.  I
> recently began using the 'patches'[1] tool, that some of you on this
> list must be familiar with, to test arbitrary QEMU patches from the
> mailing list, and found it relatively easy large patch series from
> mailing list.
> 
> I'm writing this to check if the libvirt upstream community finds it
> desirable to setup such a patches database.
> 

I haven't played much with 'patches' so I can't give a first hand opinion. But
if it's low effort to set up and maintain seems like a no-brainer to generate
and publish the metadata so libvirt devs can start playing with it.

Although your details don't cover it, one of the major benefits of 'patches'
is that it also scoops up metadata like Reviewed-by:, and gives an easy way to
get those tags into commit messages. Good for giving prolific reviewers credit
(and shaming those that don't do enough reviews :) ).

The corollary is that you can search for unreviewed series, which IMO is
desperately needed for libvir-list; the review time is pretty bad and I can't
begin to count the number of drive-by patches we've received on list over the
years that go completely unresponded. And I say this knowing full well I
probably have the worst review-to-patches-authored ratio of all libvirt
committers... but I don't live on libvir-list and often go 3-6 months at a
time where I don't have any libvirt patches, and usually during those times I
just skim-and-archive the list contents. If we had a programmatic tool to show
me the unreviewed patches, I could run that on occasion and pitch in much more
easily, at least reviewing bits that don't need a lot of context. We could
even have an informal policy like 'theres XXX number of unreviewed patches on
the list... no @redhat people post patches until we review the backlog'

What if a patch series is NACKd or abandoned, is there a way to get it out of
the patches metadata?

- Cole