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

[Gwern Branwen]

On 2008.09.02 18:13:57 +0200, Joachim Breitner <mail at joachim-breitner.de> scribbled 3.8K characters:
> Hi,
>
> For a while I thought darcswatch was essentially useless because after a
> while, it’s just a huge pile of patches. But recently it was used on the
> xmonad list to get a list of interesting, but unapplied patches and
> re-start discussion on that, so I’m slightly more interested again. I’m
> even trying to debug why it crashes sometimes, leaving a stale lock :-)
>
> 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).
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Greetings,
> Joachim

Well, I like Darcswatch. The issue you mention, stale patches, is definitely a real one - I had to be careful doing the XMonad review to look for duplicates. I think what is needed is an easy way to cancel. I would be perfectly willing to cancel all my outstanding stale ones if there were some way to do so which didn't involve rollback patches or whatever (which even when done correctly is very tedious).

I'm not familiar with how Darcwatch does emails, but would it be possible to set up a email address for each patch bundle - similar to Debian's address-per-bug - and allow the author to send an email?

For example, if a patch bundle was sent by gwern0 at gmail.com, and the darcswatch-assigned email address was 20080901212828.GI35911 at nomeata.com, the functionality could be that if I sent it an email with the subject line or body 'rejected', it would be marked rejected, 'obsolete' etc. (Acceptance and application being handled automatically).

--
gwern
M.P.R.I. B28RE in grove mjtf charge AMEMB NRO Harvard SAR
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