On a whim I hosted a BOF at the GNU tools cauldron yesterday, titled "pending patches" (no compliance with RFC5434 intended).
This was originally only out of egotistic motives: BUMPing the "Fix gcc.dg/lower-subreg-1.c failure, revisited" patch at <http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2012-07/msg00280.html> (2 months from original) and "Ping again: [RFA:] Caveat for ARM in gcc-4.7/changes.html: unaligned accesses, take 2" at <http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2012-07/msg00282.html>, but I also imagined there was a general need and opportunity to share grief and maybe discuss patch handling a bit more off-the-record than through the mailing-lists. No pretense-silver-bullets were presented, but some of the ideas that were aired seem worth pursuing. I'm sure I don't remember all good ideas (for one, I didn't actually take notes) and my recollection might not match that of the consensus, so if you were there (or if you were not) feel very free (as in software) to follow-up. Revive DannyB's patch tracker (deceased)? No; (most) people actually reviewing patches didn't use it. Automatic testing of submitted patches, with feedback? Maybe; might give added confidence in the patch, but not strictly a patch-review issue. Might be easier to implement for patches entered in Bugzilla, where patches are more likely to have machine-usable mark-up. Volunteers making sure patches reach the right reviewer as sometimes good patches aren't CCed to the right people? This might even be helped by a tool, somebody mentioned the Linux scripts/get_maintainer.pl, with proper formatting of the MAINTAINERS file (file globs to go with the domain of approval). Also, volunteers (or more tools) to make sure that patches in Bugzilla are also sent to the gcc-patches list. More tools' suggestions to simplify patch handling: a tool or archive-list function to find the archive entry for a certain message-id. I know this would help people writing pings. There were also unspecified suggestions of improvements for <http://gcc.gnu.org/contribute.html> but on revisiting that page, I can't see anything I'd like to change ...except maybe adding a call for volunteers for tasks not requiring paperwork, for example patch follow-up as per above. Oh, and instructions on how to format ping messages to help speedy review; specifically with the ChangeLog entry, a few lines explaining the patch and archive URL to the original message. More context (lines) in patches? Not as a rule: people doing review will look up the context anyway. Mostly up to the patch author to make any obviousness obvious. Unfortunately no specific ideas on how to simplify reviewing for approval-status reviewers, or how to get more reviewers, besides of course that people are always welcome to comment on patches, regardless of actual approver status. brgds, H-P
