Keeping track of patches and getting them visibility!

Today the Launchpad team released a feature that some of us on the platform team have been dying to see, the +patches view. This basically gives us another way to look at bugs in Launchpad, but now we can concentrate on bugs with patches attached. And since this is done inside Launchpad, we can use this view to look at packages, teams, people, and distro series. So if you’re doing maintenance on Hardy and want to look at patches submitted for that, you can. We also do a nice view that shows us patches by age, to help prevent the dreaded “patch fell through the cracks”. Here’s what it looks like for Gwibber. We’ve left the fixed bugs in there so that if someone runs into the page and wants to look at it they can (Let us know how we can improve this).

What Needs to Get Finished

There are some limitations. Namely right now it just shows us patches sitting in Launchpad. It currently doesn’t show us what patches are shipping in versions of Ubuntu. This is the bug to follow for this work. If you are passionate about this and want to work on it please get ahold of me and I will point you to the right guys on the Launchpad Bugs team. (Don’t worry Anthony Liguori we won’t forget about you!)

We also have a tool called Harvest that aggregates this information from other distributions and upstreams. It would be nice to suck all this up into this kind of view as well!

My Big Dream

I want this more out there in your face as part of everyone’s workflow. I want one page where every person who packages Upstart to see every patch everywhere in one place for every version. And not just for Upstart either, I want everything in the distro. And I want to know by person, or by team, or by package. We know other distros keep track of all their patches like we do, so let’s shove those in there too. I want to be able to have every patch in a package available as a bzr branch so that any person out there can just cherry pick what they want and apply it in a distro branch and push it out. If you’ve ignored a patch sitting in LP for 1048 days the world should know about it. Not to dime you out, but so other people can help you! That’s my dream anyway.

Many thanks to Karl Fogel, Abel Deuring, Deryck Hodge, and Bryce Harrington for the work they’ve put into this first step. If you’re passionate about getting patches visibility then go grab the launchpad code and come talk to us, we have plenty of work to do to make the rest of the dream happen!

If you’re coming to UDS I am planning on having a session on ways forward from here, so I hope you show up if you want to help!