Design

Patchwork should supplement mailing lists, not replace them

Patchwork isn’t intended to replace a community mailing list; that’s why you can’t comment on a patch in Patchwork. If this were the case, then there would be two forums of discussion on patches, which fragments the patch review process. Developers who don’t use Patchwork would get left out of the discussion.

However, a future development item for Patchwork is to facilitate on-list commenting, by providing a “send a reply to the list” feature for logged-in users.

Don’t pollute the project’s changelogs with Patchwork poop

A project’s changelogs are valuable - we don’t want to add Patchwork-specific metadata.

Patchwork users shouldn’t require a specific version control system

Not everyone uses git for kernel development, and not everyone uses git for Patchwork-tracked projects.

It’s still possible to hook other programs into Patchwork, using the pwclient command-line client for Patchwork, or directly to the XML RPC interface.