[9fans] proposal: a patch acceptance system

[andrey mirtchovski <mirtchov@cpsc.ucalgary.ca>]

Hello,

Several people have discussed on IRC the need for a definitive way of
submitting patches (enhancements and fixes) to Plan 9 developers with write
privileges. Currently this happens in three different ways -- sending
patches to 9fans, sending patches (fixes mostly) to 9trouble, and via
personal communication with people who can do a push on sources.

What this mechanism lacks is an easy way to get feedback on rejected or
accepted patches, and a way for developers to discriminate good and bad
ones and to know which patches have been outstanding.

We think the following solution could be sufficiently simple and general to
accomodate our needs:

Enhancements and fixes by people lacking the ability to 'push' on sources
could be put (by the users themselves) in a world-writeable directory
"/patches" on sources.cs.bell-labs.com. A particular set of patched files
submitted by a user will be located in:

	/patches/MMDD.user/*

where MM is the month, DD is the day and 'user' is the username of the
person submitting the patch, as it appears on the sources auth server.

Along with the changed files the user must submit a short README describing
in detail what this patch accomplishes, and where those files appear
relevant to the root of a Plan 9 system tree (no need to create complex
directory structures just to put a couple of files there).

Whether an announcement is made to 9fans or not is left for the user to
decide.

Plan 9 developers can then examine /patch for outstanding patches and either
add them to the system, in which case the MMDD.user directory can disappear
(it will be available in the next pull) or reject them, in which case they
go to:

	/patches/rejected/MMDD.user/

with a small 'reason' file added, where the reason for the rejection is
given. This could be made private and viewable only by the person who
submitted the patch.

One major issue with this scheme is synchronization -- making sure the files
submitted patch the latest system is left as an exercise for the patch
submitter, and making sure there's no "push"-ing of files for which there
are patches outstanding is done by the person doing the "push" (it's just a
simple "ls /patches/*/file" before "push -c /path/to/file" is done on
sources)...

Any coments will be appreciated, as long as you have in mind that we're
trying to cut short of writing a new bugzilla :)

andrey