Re: To save or not to save

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange redhat com>]

On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 03:55:11PM +0200, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 2:15 PM, Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues
> <lmr redhat com> wrote:
> > On 11/15/2012 03:49 PM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:
> >>
> >> Mostly just thinking aloud here (hence this email rather than patches
> >> on bz)! Ideas?
> >
> >
> > I was wondering why you guys use this workflow rather than the most common
> > 'patches to mailing list' approach... Wouldn't be more beneficial to have
> > the patches sent to the ML?
> 
> Thats a big debate and I have never seen anyone getting convinced
> either way around. :) To each his own I guess, both approaches has its
> advantages and disadvantages. The main advantages of bz to me are:
> 
> * you can easily track status of the patches at both patch level and
> issue/bug/topic-level.
> * you can easily setup dependencies
> * Get nice reports and even graphs of whats been happening with the project
> 
> git-bz makes working with bz pretty convenient and the issues people
> have with bz are usually bugs/improvements in bz software that are
> fixable, not exactly problems with the approach of using bz itself.

The single most important part of patch submission process is the actual
code review. More specifically the abilities wrt quoting parts of the
submitted patch, giving inline comments on its issues, and the ability of
others to follow these replies in a threaded manner. This is where BZ
really falls flat, even for regular bug reporting conversations. Tracking
status / dependencies / reports are all nice things to do, but they are
ultimately secondary to the task of doing code review. The use of mailing
lists optimizes for the most important aspects, and BZs advantages cannot
anywhere near make up for its shortcomings in this area.

Daniel
-- 
|: http://berrange.com      -o-    http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org              -o-             http://virt-manager.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: http://entangle-photo.org       -o-       http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|