Third party Patch Manager

[Alex Tweedly]

Eric Chatonet wrote:

> Hi again Jim,
>
> I think the users and not the patches providers may ask runRev in  
> order to obtain such a thing :-)
> I think it would be useful for the community.
> I think it would be courageous from runRev to accept it.
>
If I was RunRev, I wouldn't be that courageous :-)  And, to be honest, 
I'd rather that RunRev kept their efforts for the things that we, the 
community, can't do ..... and organizing a list of known patches is 
something we can do.

I think we could satisfy the needs with a scheme like the following :

Someone hosts a site that collects a list of known patches. (I'll 
happily volunteer to do this,  it's about time I used some of my web 
space for something useful - though in some ways it would be better if 
it were hosted by one of the already well-known sites like Ken or 
Richard (or revJournal ??))

The list consists of, for each patch,
 author, date, URL for the patch, description, version it was written 
for, Bugzilla number, fixed-in version

Note the most important part of that is the Bugzilla number - either of 
a bug report or enhancement request. This ensures that RunRev are aware 
of the need (desire) for a change, and provides a reliable mechanism to 
verify whether the feature (or fix) has been incorporated into a later 
release.  The "fixed-in version" can be filled in later, based on the 
changes in the BZ database when a new release comes out.

The list of patches could be accessed via web browser, or via a small 
stack (again, I'll write this if there is interest .... but I won't be 
doing that until mid-August onwards). The stack would pick up any 
updates from the URL, allow the user to mark which patches she has 
applied to which version on which machines, etc.

So at any time you could go run this stack, and determine if there are 
patches you'll need to apply to a new version, or whether there are new 
patches.

The quality of the patches would be entirely up to the author of any 
patch - no judgment to be applied by the list-holder.

The patches remain on the author's own web-site - and hence can be 
withdrawn, updated, or otherwise changed. Optionally, they could also be 
uploaded to the patch-list site, e.g. if the author didn't have web 
space available.



-- 
Alex Tweedly       http://www.tweedly.net



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