Re: HEAD is open for 8.5 development

On Thu, 2 Jul 2009, Robert Haas wrote:

> I think it's important to clarify the distinction between when a
> committer is planning to look at the patch but maybe somebody else
> should too, and when the committer is planning to take exclusive
> responsibility for the patch and nobody else should bother touching it.

Suggesting additional work for the committers is never a good idea, and
the tagging scheme you suggested seems pretty heavy for something that's
not particularly common. How about you add an additional "Committer"
field to the table, to be filled in when it's appropriate to do so and
defaulting to "nobody" as usual. That would be handy in a lot of cases to
track who is working on that part of patch application anyway. And in the
special case you're trying to handle, I'd think listing their name under
both reviewer/committer fields would be sufficient to deflect wasted
review effort.

> Also, if people date-stamp their comments (which will happen
> automatically if we get over to my new system), it makes it possible to
> get a sense of how long it's been since a certain state change took
> place.

The Mediawiki standard here is that you can use the various tilde macros
to fill these in: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Signatures

I wonder if it's possible to include that expansion in the CommitFest
templates? Even if it's not, we could strongly encourage its use. When
you're using the page editor, one of the little buttons at the top is
"Your signature with timestamp", and it expands to "--~~~~"; that makes it
easy to remember this particular bit.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD