"Series" support questions

[Bjorn Helgaas]

On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 8:15 PM, Daniel Axtens <dja at axtens.net> wrote:
> Hi Bjorn,
>
>> The new "series" support is seems like a potentially nice thing but
>> isn't super useful to me yet.  Maybe I'm not using it correctly, or
>> maybe there are enhancements planned.  Here's what I see:
>>
>>   - The "Series" column takes up a lot of horizontal space in the
>> browser window.
>>   - The content is usually redundant because it's either the same as
>> the "Patch" column (for single patches) or it's repeated N times for a
>> series of N patches.
>>
> There is clearly (clearly!) a long way to go with UI and once we fix the
> bugs we will work on it!
>
>> What would seem useful to me is to treat a series as more of a
>> first-class object, e.g.,
>>
>>   - Omit the "Series" column entirely.
>>   - For single patches, don't show any series information at all.
>>   - For N-patch series, show the series title on a separate line,
>> followed by the existing 1..N lines indented a little bit, e.g.,
>>
>>       Series: Address error and recovery for AER and DPC
>>         [v10,7/7] PCI/DPC: Enumerate the devices after DPC trigger event
>>         [v10,6/7] PCI: Unify wait for link active into generic pci
>>         [v10,5/7] PCI/AER: Unify aer error defines at single space
>>         ...
>>
>
> So you've landed on the big philosophical debate between mainline
> Patchwork and the freedesktop fork - are we mostly about series, or
> mostly about patches? The freedesktop fork went big on series and we
> went big on patches. I got involved mostly on the tail-end of this,
> Stephen can fill you in further. But I think having done that, we
> actually got it half-right and half-wrong: we were write to have patches
> as the key back-end element, but we were wrong to have them as the key
> front-end element; that should have been Series.
>
> There are currently lots of issues parsing series out of emails (out of
> order delivery! parallel parsing of multiple emails in the same series!
> the several ways people don't do threading properly!) that lead to them
> being a bit flaky. Once we fix that and the other pressing performance
> bugs, I think making Series a bigger thing in the front end is definitely
> worth persuing.

Thanks for the background!  I wasn't aware of the freedesktop fork
(which looks like it has a similar "encoded-word" issue, BTW).

I see what you mean about the freedesktop series orientation.  Not
sure that's really a win yet either, because it makes it more clunky
to deal with individual (non-series) patches.  But it sounds like this
is a fertile area for discussion.  Wish I had the time and expertise
to help out.

Bjorn