Re: getting patches organized

[Jim Blandy <jimb at cygnus dot com>]

> > The only system I'm really familiar with is GNATS.  GNATS can
> > automatically stash E-mail conversation related to a patch in the
> > patch record ("PR"), which is exactly what we want.  It's got web
> > interfaces, a decent query ability, and so on.  So I think it would
> > work great.
> 
> If folks are not familiar with GNATS and want to see what it looks like,
> bring up
> 
> 	http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cgi-bin/gnatsweb.pl
> 
> There are several active databases on here; select something like
> autoconf, automake or java and you can browse around read-only.

Right now, those pages seem organized around the capabilities of
GNATS.  This is nice, because if you know what you want to do in
GNATS, it's easy to figure out how to do it on the web.

But it's not organized around thing people actually want to do while
working on GDB (or whatever).  It would be better to have the home
page for the patch database give introductory information, and then
have a series of forms for the most common queries:

- Which patches have I submitted?  (result sorted by state: active
  patches first, applied and rejected patches at bottom.  links to
  individual patches.)
- Which patches am I responsible for?  (Same sort order.)
- Find me patches whose synopsis/body contains this string.  (Same
  sort order.)

... and maybe some others.  Maybe the home page should simply always
list all the active patches, if that's fast enough.

These are all easy to do with the query interface, but they're what
you always want, so they should be one-click operations.  I defined
Emacs keys to do common GNATS queries for me; this interface should be
at least that nice.