Re: Gitlab Migration

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2021 08:55:41 +0200
> Cc: <danflscr@gmail.com>, "Philip Kaludercic" <philipk@posteo.net>,
>  <theo@thornhill.no>, <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>, <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> From: "Drew DeVault" <sir@cmpwn.com>
> 
> > - Rebasing. Some of our valued contributors are not 100% comfortable
> > with the more advanced features of Git, rebasing included. Our general
> > recommendation until now has been to prefer merge commits. If the
> > general workflow is going to require people to 'git rebase -i' on a
> > regular basis, it could be a problem.
> 
> We wrote another tutorial about git rebase which has been very helpful:
> 
> https://git-rebase.io
> 
> In general we are a hard "no" on shying away from powerful tools because
> they are intimidating to new users. We prefer to cultivate a culture of
> mentorship instead.

Rebasing is not just intimidating, it has real problems as well.  One
problem that particularly bothers us is that it could, in some
circumstances, cause the same commit to be present more than once.

I find a hard requirement to use rebase to be user-unfriendly, because
some of us simply don't want to rebase, for reasons of preserving the
original history of the development.  Is rebasing really a requirement
in SourceHut?

> > - Can I jump in in the middle of a patch discussion with a question or
> > an advice and have all subsequent messages in that discussion sent to me
> > too, if I'm not subscribed to the target mailing list? Does that depend
> > on all participants putting me in Cc?
> 
> It depends on all of the participants Cc'ing you. It is common practice
> to "reply all" on mailing lists for this reason.

Too many people forget to "Reply All", we have this all the time on
our current bug tracker.  Is there a way to arrange for automatic
subscription to a discussion once you post to that discussion?

> > - Can I "unsubscribe" from replies to a topic/thread/patchset I'm not
> > longer interested in?
> 
> In a sense. Because you don't have to subscribe to the mailing list to
> participate in a thread, you won't get emails unless the sender has Cc'd
> you. But you cannot stop them from Cc'ing you, and neither can we,
> unless you ask nicely - which is not a software solution. Such emails
> are not relayed by our mail servers, so it's out of our control.
> 
> Subscribing to individual threads is also prioritized.

Does this mean that currently starting a discussion doesn't
automatically subscribe me to that discussion?

Thanks.