lost patches and aegis

[Andrew Cagney <ac131313 at cygnus dot com>]

Hello,

One of the characteristics of the current patch tracking system is that
there is a good chance that a patch gets lost.  I try to avoid this by
(as you've probagly now seen) saving every patch submitted to
gdb-patches and then, slowly going back through them and ping people
(including myself) about things that appear to be forgotten (1).  Mind
you pinging people about 9 month old patches is probably getting silly
:-)

Still, while this system is far from perfect, I suspect it is the best
process we have.  There have been various proposals but I suspect that
none would work in what is a volunteer organization.

However, I do have one other trick up my sleeve, (sarcasm mode on) if I
think people are getting slack with responding to patches, I just
threaten to introduce ``aegis'' as the complete solution to our
configuration and patch tracking problems :-).  See:

http://www.canb.auug.org.au/~millerp/aegis/aegis.html
Aegis is a transaction based software configuration management system.
It provides a framework  within which a team of developers may work on
many changes to a program independently, and Agis co-ordinates
integrating these changes back into the master source of the program,
with as little disruption as possible. 

for why it is the ``stick''.

In reality, it won't happen, I'd have to convince all the maintainers -
BFD, GDB, GCC, DEJAGNU, ... to switch.  Still, it doesn't stop me
threatening :-)

Oh, and I don't have anything against aegis.  If I was starting a new
project, I'd probably select it as the configuration management tool.

	enjoy,
		Andrew

(1) If you've ever wondered why I personally prefer people posting
ChangeLog entries with a date and why I also prefer the old date format,
this is it.  The old style date/time made it really easy to scan through
the ChangeLog file to see if a patch was committed.  I could even
differentiate between different patches generated in the same day.