commitfest management webapp - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

Back in January, there was some discussion of creation a web
application to make it easier to manage CommitFests.

http://archives.postgresql.org/message-id/20090127134245.GA6444@alvh.no-ip.org

This was further discussed at PGCon, and I now have a working version
for folks to play with.  With the help of Dave Page, I was able to
relearn how to use the BSD ports collection and get it up here:

http://coridan.postgresql.org/

Feedback is appreciated, especially from people involved in previous
commitfests as committers, reviewers, patch authors, or commitfest
managers.  The source code, in Perl, is available here:

http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=pgcommitfest.git;a=summary

A few things to note:

1. You won't see a link anywhere to create a new CommitFest or edit
the name of an existing CommitFest.  This is not because the
functionality doesn't exist, but because your community login account
is not enabled with administrator privileges for this application.
For the same reason, you won't be able to edit or delete comments
other than your own.  If you would like to have these great powers,
please send me a private email with your community account name and I
will power you up.  If we decide to use this as official project
infrastructure, then you might get un-powered up unless I or one of
the CommitFest managers have some idea who you are.  :-)

2. There are many things that this application doesn't do.  One
particularly glaring thing that it doesn't do is allow you to move a
patch from one CommitFest to another CommitFest.  This is basically a
bug that I intend to fix, but it didn't seem necessary to fix it
before putting the thing out there for people to look at and comment
on.  At any rate, if the application doesn't do something that you
wish it did, please feel free to let me know what that thing is, or
provide a patch.  I'm very interested in making this better (unless of
course you all hate it, in which case my interest in improving it will
likely decline precipitously).

3. The integration with the community login system is currently rather
poor.  The problem is that we can't count on patch submitters to have
a community login, and even if they do we can't count on the person
adding the patch to the system to know what it is.  We could of course
require patch submitters to have a community login and to add their
patches themselves, but I'm not really that keen on raising the bar
for submitting a patch even to that modest extent.  I'm open to
suggestions on how to improve this situation, though, because it's
definitely not ideal, and precludes things that reasonable people
might want to do, like "contact the guy who submitted this patch",
"contact the authors of all patches waiting for review", and similar.

4. The intent of this system is really just to get the data that is
currently on the CommitFest pages into a database where, I venture to
say, structured data about the development cycle of a database product
properly belongs.  I expect it to be possible to use this tool to
build additional infrastructure to facilitate patch review, like an
automated test to see whether all the latest versions of all the open
patches actually still apply.  (If we have a human being sanity check
them to make sure they don't contain malicious code, we could also
test for "compiles" and "passes regression tests", which would rock.)
This infrastructure does not currently exist, but having the data in a
database makes it feasible to think about doing it; suggestions are
welcome, as is code.  I know that there are some of you reading this
who may think that we should convert to reviewboard or patchwork or
some other system.  I can say that personally I'm unimpressed by those
suggestions because they will almost certainly require process changes
that this does not, process changes which I suspect we're unprepared
to make.  But there's nothing to prevent you from setting up and
advocating your system in this space.

...Robert