When I started contributing to Linux Kernel, one of my favorite tasks for learning more about the kernel was following the public mailing list of the subsystem that I was interested in. A few months after I started contributing to the kernel, I became a maintainer and had to follow patches related to the driver that I was maintaining. A few weeks ago, I also became one of the maintainers of the display component under the amdgpu driver. Yeah… I am aware that I’m doing poor work as a maintainer, which I blame the lack of structure in my review flow. Don’t get me wrong, I was trying… for example, I set up my neomutt to help me with that, but unfortunately, I could not use it anymore due to external forces, which broke my already inefficient review process. Anyway, I’m uncomfortable about that since I want to be a better maintainer, but I realize that I need to fix my workflow.

With these ideas in mind, I have to admit:

1. I’m not well versed in Linux Kernel yet, which means that I like to test patches before adding my Reviewed-by;

2. Download patches from my email client was painful and not comfortable to me;

3. The lack of mailing list management becomes a problem in a short time;
4. Relying on multiple external tools (e.g., patchwork, email client, lore, etc.) was not working for me.

I use kw every day, I thought I could include patch reviews and some maintainer’s tasks as part of my workflow with kw. Fortunately, this can be possible thanks to the lore API introduced to the Linux kernel mailing list. Finally, I want something that makes my life easier and with as little overhead as possible, and a simple UI would be perfect for that; luckily, I became aware of an elegant (at least from my perspective), simple, and stable tool named dialog!

Since all pieces were in the table, I made a super simple interface prototype and shared it with Melissa Wen, who immediately liked it and got on board with this project idea. To make things simple, Melissa and I decided to create a small prototype in a separate repository to simplify our collaboration. You can see it here:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/siqueira/lore-prototype

After two months of work, we have a tiny functional prototype. In this post, I don’t want to talk about the details, but I want to share a gif that shows a demo of this little prototype:

That’s it for this post. Stay tuned for new kw updates.

What is next?

1. Complete our prototype
   • Complete all windows that we planned in this issue:

   https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/siqueira/lore-prototype/-/issues/4

   • Squash as many bugs as possible
2. Integrate it to kw
   • PR 1: Introduce liblore file with massive code coverage.
   • PR 2: Introduce dialog lib.
   • PR 3: Implement windows