Re: [RFE] Migration to gitlab

[Konstantin Kharlamov <hi-angel@yandex.ru>]

В Вт, мар 19, 2019 at 9:15 ПП (PM), Eli Zaretskii 
<eliz@gnu.org> написал:
>>  Cc: hi-angel@yandex.ru, theophilusx@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
>>  From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
>>  Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2019 16:13:53 +0200
>> 
>>  the Savannah UI is mostly unused by everybody.
> 
> Savannah UI and Savannah are not identical, far from that.
> 
>>  Of course not. Not every potential contributor anyway. Further, if 
>> I'm
>>  reviewing a random patch, *I* don't know if the contribution 
>> satisfies
>>  the CA requirements. If an automatic checking process were 
>> available, I
>>  could just respond with "Thanks!" and merge.
> 
> Such automated checking is n ot easy to set up, because the copyright
> assignment database includes some details that are private and cannot
> be exposed to public interfaces.  So someone will have to come up with
> a service that publishes only the public parts of that, and even then
> there will be some rare cases where a manual check will be needed.
> 
>>  >> At least some of these checks could be automated on a CI.
>>  >
>>  > They can also be automated by Git commit hooks.  It's just a 
>> matter of
>>  > someone doing the job.
>> 
>>  Hooks can help, but if Emacs doesn't even allow one to *commit* a
>>  change, it might discourage that person from continuing, or
>>  investigating the failed requirement. We can add too many checks to
>>  commit hooks.
> 
> It is all too easy to disable/bypass the hooks, as you probably know
> very well.  So this doesn't sound like an important issue to me.

It looks too easy when you already know how it works. An aribtrary 
newcomer don't.

When a newbie wants to change a code, they don't need to know all 
contribution details, because they're in hacking stage. They're just 
getting acknowledged with the code, they exercise their coding and 
debugging skills. It's the most fragile stage, you don't want to put 
any artifical obstacles here, because there's already a lot of 
unknowns, they may just get overwhelmed.

Btw, Emacs already has at least one git hook, and it's so annoying! The 
hook simply aborts a commit when sees "signed-off-by" message. I'm 
using autocompletion in zsh with `git commit -sv` as last command, so 
it's something I do reflexively. And, while I do appreciate the check 
itself, but having to rewrite a commit message another time isn't nice. 
You might ask me "c'mon, usually there's very little text". Well, while 
that's true most of the time, but for non-native english speaker even 
writing one paragraph may take a bit more effort to do the 
proof-reading, fixing wrong articles, etc. And it's annoying having to 
rewrite that again.

My point is: moving these destructive checks to the moment of the 
actual contribution to upstream (i.e. the gitlab CI that runs for every 
merge-request) would make more pleasant experience for contributors, 
whilst not taking anything from maintainers (sure, "fix unit-test 
failures that your commit caused" is something that a contributor could 
probably figure out themselves).