[darcs-users] darcswatch ideas (Was: growing the darcs team)

[Jason Dagit]

On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 9:13 AM, Joachim Breitner
<mail at joachim-breitner.de> wrote:

> Anyways, what features would be required to make it more useful, and how
> can add them? Note that I'd like to keep the architecture of interacting
> with darcswatch by sending mails, and of having static files as the
> output. (Mostly because I'd like to keep it simple, predictable and easy
> to keep running).

It would be nice to have the equivalent of threading or bug tracking
for patches.  Think of how roundup and other bug trackers work.  Each
bug is like a thread, and related threads can be pointed at existing
ones.  Comments on that thread get grouped, finding a thread is easy,
so is updating the status, giving feedback and viewing the contents of
the bug is also easy.  I would like to be able to do that with patches
too.  For me this means having an optional interactive web interface
that brings it all together.  Some people here on the list are
satisfied with using email clients such as mutt and I don't want them
to have to change.  But, using programs like mutt is unacceptable for
myself as I demand a nice cross platform solution that doesn't require
extensive per machine configuration, nor am I interested in learning
or adopting a new email system at this time.

Or, maybe instead of two instances of roundup it can support both
issue and patch tracking?  So you might have
http://bugs.darcs.net/issue27 and http://patches.darcs.net/patch122
which are actually in the same roundup instance but patch and issue
are separate name spaces for tracking purposes but can cross reference
each other.

I did suggest a second instance of roundup for patch tracking as I
think it would more or less do everything I want while allowing others
to continue using email clients.  The one thing roundup probably
wouldn't do quite the way I want is defaulting to showing patch
contents regardless of the mime type that the patch was sent with.  It
also wouldn't provide a way to automatically apply the patch bundle to
my local repository -- but that feature might be tricky in all
solutions except mutt.  Although, this may be solvable with firefox
plugins.  Not a solution I'm thrilled about since it requires firefox
and requires installing a plugin but if everything else worked the way
I want I would probably just live with that detail.

> darcswatch already is subscribed to the list, so it could easily save
> and list all mails that are sent in reply to a patch. Or at least, to
> save disk space, list the message IDs. Is there a good way to go from a
> messgae id (20080901212828.GI35911%40Macintosh.local) to an archive url
> (http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2008-September/013403.html)?
>
> Then we could additionally have darcswatch check the subject or mail for
> keywords like "reviewed", similar to how we currently support "obsolete"
> and "rejected", and easily get a listing of all reviewed, but unapplied
> patches. We could also gather statistics on the reviewers.

The impression I had from our previous discussions and what you say
here is that you're not interested in adding the features to
darcswatch that make it the tool I want.  I respect that and so I've
never really prodded you to make darcswatch into what I want :)
Perhaps that's unfair to you though since darcswatch is very cool and
you're doing a nice job with it.

> All these mails can (and should) still go via the mailing list, so there
> is no unnecessary separation and all ongoing work is still easily
> monitored by reading the mailing list.

Yes!  I fully agree and we do that currently with bugs.

>
> But I guess before going in to the details: Is a mail based app actually
> welcome? I'm heavily debian based, where the debian bug tracking system
> is fully mail based, and it's great, but of course it's a slightly
> higher entry barrier.

I'm not familiar with the debian bug tracking system, but our bug
tracker is an either/or solution.  You can use the web interface or
emails and you tend to use both but for different purposes.  Overall
it could be better but it's certainly good enough to get work done.

thanks,
Jason