Two GCC stories

Bugzilla is useless to track patches: 1) Submitters would need to manually add patches to bugzilla, this won't accepted by most GCC developers, who submit patches via email, or by infrequent contributors, who do not want to create a bugzilla account 2) Reviewers will not check bugzilla for patches to review, in fact, patches in bugzilla but not sent to gcc-patches are often ignored forever 3) There is not easy/simple way to list unreviewed patches 4) Bugzilla cannot track approved/rejected status by email. Perhaps one could make bugzilla overcome the above limitations, but nobody has done it, so proposals of what GCC devs could do without offering to do it are a bit useless.

GCC developers may be willing to add a keyword to an email to say that a patch is accepted, rejected or committed, but they will not login to a website. Most GCC reviewers will not even look at the website. So reviewboard (and all patch trackers I know about) is out.

The patch tracker developed by Daniel Berlin was the closest thing to this, and even in that case was fairly underused because it was only useful for listing unreviewed patches by non-persistent contributors, and most reviewers won't look to a website for patches to review. They already have a lot of patches to review, so patches from people that don't have enough interest to follow-up their own submissions are not a critical concern.

I think the GCC project could benefit enormously from a patch tracker that could be operated from mail, IRC and web, that allowed grouping patches by maintenance area and status, that kept a history of past patches, that build and tested patches automatically and reported failures to the original submitter, that could generate automatic pings for unreviewed patches (every 15 days or more), that tracked email conversations about a patch (patchwork does this already), that enabled to submit patches via web, that checked the existence of categories markers, correct Changelog, correct GNU style formatting, ...

Of course, this is a dream that no one has made true so far.

Right now, the only solution is to encourage submitters to ping patches from time to time, and ensure that their approved patches have also been committed.