Re: Gitlab Migration

[Maxim Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com>]

On 27/08/2021 08:01, Tim Cross wrote:
> Dmitry Gutov writes:
> 
>> Email is used by virtually everyone (for example, to receive notifications about
>> others' actions or messages), what's "unusual" for many is sending patches over
>> email. Or inlining them in comments/messages.
> 
> I'm not sure this is true. I think virtually all developers are forced
> to suffer email, but a gorwing number don't use it. Often, all the
> discussions, notifications, comments etc are actually consumed via a
> mobile 'app'. For these users, logging into their inbox is frustrating
> and inconvenient because their inbox is full of pointless and old
> messages/notifications/alerts they have already seen/received via other
> channels.

Duplication of notifications to a messenger + mail is definitly a source 
of annoyance and ability to configure notifications in its source is a 
handy feature.

Narrowing to email, it may be used by virtually everyone but much less 
people are able to setup mail filters accordingly to personal priorities 
of notifications. Ideally such tuning should be minimized, actually 
there is no common denominator for this kind of preferences, so some 
settings are unavoidable duty of users.

What is really sour is that notifications are often quite inconvenient 
for filtering.

I had positive experience with gerrit + redmine + sieve filters. Due to 
reach set of extended headers in mail messages it was possible to choose 
mail box based on committer, issue assignee or status change, result of 
build+tests. Failure of build of a my commit is rather important event. 
On the other hand I rarely visited mailbox with notification that build 
is started for someone else or even for me. A few iterations of filter 
tuning was stored in git.

For notifications from bitbucket and jira it was much harder or even 
impossible to determine the precise reason and configuring filters in 
outlook was a pain. There was no convenient set of X-... headers. I did 
not mange to approach to configuration that I considered as convenient 
from my previous experience.

Messengers are horror in the sense of customization and filtering of 
notifications. Channels are hard coded, instruments to suppress some 
messages are rather rude.

To avoid suffer due to email, development tools should be created with 
care and their users should be aware of features like filtering.

P.S. I have not checked whether notifications from SourceHut have reach 
enough metadata.