[coreboot] Patch management

David Hendricks dhendrix at google.com
Sun May 31 23:03:10 CEST 2009


On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 10:56 AM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 9:01 PM, Peter Stuge <peter at stuge.se> wrote:
>
> > I would like to request a better patch management system than this
> > mailing list. The fact the above "ping" is now a part of our
> > development process is a very strong indication that things are not
> > functioning very well.
>
> it's a hard problem. I'm on several projects. They are all non-ideal
> in some way. Linux sucks in patches at the rate of 30,000 a year or
> so; that's fine performance but some feel (me included) that the
> kernel is "de-cohering": it no longer has the small tight feel and
> coherence of vision that it might have once had. Plan 9 still has the
> same tight feel and coherence but at a cost: important patches seem to
> linger on the vine for (i am not kidding here) years .
>
> Coreboot is trickier than a kernel, as trivial errors can lead to
> systems that can not be recovered. I especially avoid acking flashrom
> patches because I can't test most of them. Others I know don't like to
> NAK, but they're not comfortable with an ACK either; they don't like
> the code but they don't want to hold up progress.
>
> All in all, I think the process works. Yes, it is not ideal.  Yes, it
> could be better, but so could everything.
>
> ron
>
> --
> coreboot mailing list: coreboot at coreboot.org
> http://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot
>

Indeed, changing the whole process might not be worth the effort considering
the trade-offs. There are some tools that can make the current process a lot
less painful, however, specifically web-based code review
dashboards<http://ostatic.com/blog/open-source-code-review-tools>.
Review Board <http://www.review-board.org/> from the folks at VMWare looks
really good, and Rietveld <http://code.google.com/p/rietveld/>, which is a
relatively new open-source fork of Google's
Mondrian<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMql3Di4Kgc#t=25m20s>code
review tool, is quite helpful as well though it seems behind RB at the
moment.

-- 
David Hendricks (dhendrix)
Systems Software Engineer, Google Inc.
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