"Peter Eisentraut" <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:
> Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>> Do other large projects accept patches 'ad hoc' like we do? FreeBSD?
>> Linux? KDE?
>...
> Postfix is the only major project I looked at that didn't have any bug tracker
> linked at an obvious location.
Those are used for tracking bugs though. (Incidentally I just checked our
debian packages and there are about half a dozen open bugs tagged "upstream",
some quite old)
I know of no other project which mails around patches the way we do, not
since, 1992. Other projects "track" proposed changes by keeping them in their
revision control systems.
This has a whole host of benefits including not losing version history when
the patch is finally merged into the mainline code. Right now, for instance,
if you want to understand why a change was made in HOT if you annotate it
you'll always get the same commit and it'll just have a message from Tom
saying he's committing HOT. All of Pavan's commit messages explaining the
changes he made are lost.
This is all a moot point as long as we CVS. Branching in CVS is such a pain to
manage and so risky that we wouldn't want to be creating branches for every
project. But I have some hope that git, svk, or something else will solve this
problem for us.
And indeed the closest analogue I can think of to our habit of mailing around
patches is the Linux kernel where people often do post proposed patches and
patches get signed off by a second developer. Each maintainer keeps track on
his own todo list of patches to take and patches to send upstream though.
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