Patch Statuses in Launchpad (re-visited)

[Scott Kitterman]

On Wed, 28 May 2008 08:46:26 +0200 Daniel Holbach 
<daniel.holbach at canonical.com> wrote:
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>Hash: SHA1
>
>Hello everybody,
>
>I thought about my initial proposal again and must say I wasn't too
>happy with the use of tags either, I still think though that it's
>vitally important to not lose bugs that have proposed solutions in the
>mediocrity of the huge list of bugs (all bugs marked as medium, all bugs
>marked as new).

In every case I can recall where I've worked with a submitter, they've come 
back and fixed whatever issues I came up with during sponsorship review.  
Such bugs aren't lost, just handed back to the submitter for further work.  

I don't think I've run across a case where someone submitted an incomplete 
patch, didn't fix it, and then someone else came along and made use of it.  
I'm sure this happens, but I believe it to be extremely rare.

>I'd like to make use of three list in my new proposal:
>https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.has_patch=on would be the
>general lists of bugs with patches.
>
>Daniel Holbach schrieb:
>>  - use "patch-needs-work" if you reviewed a patch and it needs more work
>>  (or you flat-out rejected it)
>
>Can we agree on using "Incomplete" in this case?
>https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.status%3Alist=INCOMPLETE_WITH_RESPONSE&field.status%3Alist=INCOMPLETE_WITHOUT_RESPONSE&field.has_patch=on
>then would be the list of bugs with patches that still need work.

There was some discussion from Launchpad developers at UDS about turning 
the bug janitor back on.  We don't, I'm pretty sure, want to expire the bug 
in such cases as it's the patch that's incomplete, not the bug.

>>  - use "patch-went-upstream" if you forwarded it upstream to get their
>> input before uploading it to Ubuntu
>
>If we add an upstream task, we could make use of
>https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.status_upstream=open_upstream&field.has_patch=on
>that are forwarded upstream and still need upstream input and
>https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.status_upstream=resolved_upstream&field.has_patch=on
>the patches that were forwarded upstream and the upstream bugs that have
>been resolved.

I think an upstream bug task is sufficent in this case.  You really can't 
understand the status of an upstream bug/patch review without reading their 
bug, so I don't think the added complexity adds much.

>I repeat: untagging the "patch flag" is easier, but we lose information
>that is very important if we don't want to lose possible solutions in
>the 40k bugs we have open anyway.

My fundamental dis-agreement is that this information is very important.  I 
see some value, but find considerably more value in in keeping the process 
simple/usable.

Scott K