Re: [RFE] Migration to gitlab

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

On Ср, Mar 20, 2019 at 10:23:08, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>>  Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2019 09:56:34 +0300
>>  From: Konstantin Kharlamov <hi-angel@yandex.ru>
>>  Cc: dgutov@yandex.ru, theophilusx@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> 
>>  > And my point is that we are once again arguing about very much 
>> minor
>>  > issues, without doing anything about, nor even touching, the more
>>  > important ones.  E.g., I asked up-thread whether you knew how many
>>  > people review patches for Emacs; did you follow up on that?  This 
>> is
>>  > IMO much more important for Emacs development and eventually for 
>> its
>>  > future than whether our CI will be from Gitlab or from somewhere 
>> else,
>>  > definitely more important than the commit hooks issue.
>> 
>>  I didn't reply this point because I don't know what to add. I get 
>> that
>>  there's not much people doing review, but it's a pain present in 
>> most
>>  projects. Even some Linux kernel subsystems often lacks proper 
>> review,
>>  I regularly see articles about that on LWN popping up — and the
>>  kernel has thousands of contributors, most of them are paid ones.
> 
> Unlike in many other projects, I consider the situation with patch
> review, and more generally with the number of domain experts we have
> on board in Emacs, a disaster.

FTR, I think one reason that not many people are doing review is the 
requirement for patches to be sent to bugtracker. Besides being just 
confusing (obviously, it's a hack to work around lack of patch-tracking 
system on emacs-devel), this conflicts with the fact, that contributors 
are more likely to be subscribed to devel list rather than to 
bugtracker.

For example, I'm not subscribed to bugtracker because I don't know 
Emacs internals to give any useful comment for bugs. But at least for 
*.c file changes I could help a bit with review if I saw something on 
ML.

If you (not you personally, but Emacs developers) are trying to use 
mailing list workflow, you might want to copy some parts of it from 
other projects, such as Mesa drivers. Ignoring for a second the fact 
that Mesa partially moved to gitlab, for ML part they used α) 
patchwork site to keep track of patches on mesa-devel, and β) 
bugtracker notifications go to mesa-devel ML, so 
contributors/developers see them.

And while on it, a few weeks ago I sent 2 patches to bugtrackers, and I 
got a notification for each of them. I'm horrified to imagine what I 
gonna see if I send a series of 20 patches.