Patch Statuses in Launchpad

[Daniel Holbach]

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Hello everybody,

in the "Universe QA" session at UDS we discussed handling of patches in
Launchpad. https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.has_patch=on
currently has 2159 on it and it's particularly frustrating to review
that list because some of the patches were already rejected, some need
more work, etc.

We had Björn Tillenius in the session who let us know that there's no
immediate goal of adding "patch status" functionality to Malone.

During the session we discussed the usage of tags to indicate what kind
of action is necessary. I propose the following usage to make our lifes
easier until Launchpad has grown its own patch handling:

 - don't mass-tag bugs with patches, instead assume that a review is
necessary if none of the tags below are used,
 - use "patch-needs-work" if you reviewed a patch and it needs more work
 (or you flat-out rejected it)
 - use "patch-went-upstream" if you forwarded it upstream to get their
input before uploading it to Ubuntu

The benefits are obvious:
 - we have a way coordinating our efforts
 - make "bugs-with-patches-attached ZERO" an achievable goal
 - don't mass-tag loads of bugs
 - don't delete patch attachments in bugs to keep track of stuff
 - distinguish between bug status and patch status (ie: patch might be
applied already, but bug is 'incomplete' because feedback is missing, etc)
 - This would make lists like really-fix-it far more usable

The downsides are the following:
 - What about bugs with more than one patch attached (more than one
task)? Do we just stick to the "if no tag is set, review is required" rule?
 - AFAIK there's no Malone way to ask for all bugs that don't have a tag
set [1].

Did I miss any use-cases? What do you think?

Have a nice day,
 Daniel



[1] This script helps though:
>>> import urllib
>>> bwpa = set(map(lambda a: int(a),
urllib.urlopen("http://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs-text?field.has_patch=on")))
>>> bwptnw = set(map(lambda a: int(a),
urllib.urlopen("http://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs-text?field.tag=patch-needs-work")))
>>> print len(bwpa.difference(bwptnw))


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