Re: Guix Days: Patch flow discussion

[Josselin Poiret <dev@jpoiret.xyz>]

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Hi Hartmut,

Hartmut Goebel <h.goebel@crazy-compilers.com> writes:

> Anyhow, all of this has been discussed several times already. And as 
> long as vocal (and active :-) members of the community insist on being 
> able to work via e-mail — while also not adopting modern e-mail-capable 
> forges — this situation will not change.

While I agree with your assessment of what's missing in this workflow,
I'm not sure I know of any e-mail-capable forges that resolve those
particular pain points…  People often think that eg. sr.ht works better
for this, but I don't think the sr.ht MLs have any more structure than
what we have.  For smaller projects, it works okay, but once you get to
the scale of something like Guix, it doesn't offer anything more.

One thing I would like to get rid of though is debbugs.  It causes a lot
of pain for everyone, eg. when sending patchsets, it completely breaks
modern email because it insists on rewriting DMARC-protected headers,
thus needing to also rewrite "From:" to avoid DMARC errors.

I've been following the Linux kernel development a bit closer this past
year, and while there are things that need to improve (like knowing the
status of a patchset in a maintainer's tree), they at least have a lot
of tools that I think we should adopt more broadly:

b4/lei is a nice example (we already have yhetil.org as a back-end, but
maybe a more blessed one would be better) of a tool that lets you
completely automate applying a patchset to a branch.

patchwork is a nice tool to gather up and track patchsets, with status
indicators like "under review", "accepted", etc.  Chris already deploys
one as part of QA, more integration with it would be nice.

One advantage of this is that we would benefit from upstream's bigger
user-base and dev time, and also from the fact that these tools are made
to work together (b4 can automatically mark patchsets as accepted)!

Best,
-- 
Josselin Poiret

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