Re: Kernel development collaboration platform wish list

[Eric Wong <e@80x24.org>]

"Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> One of the things I'd like to add as a strong desire is the ability to
> review patches via web if that's what users would like to do.  There
> are some real benefits for web-based review.  It means that if you
> need to see greater context, it's relatively easy to do this.  It also
> is convenient to be able to see the conversation for a particular hunk
> of code right alongside the code.

I've already started on that with public-inbox; it's not enabled
on lore, yet(*); but public-inbox.org/git can use "git apply"
and dfpre:/dfpost: search prefixes to reconstruct git blobs out
of emailed patches.

For example, a self-rejected patch I posted in 2016:

  https://public-inbox.org/git/20160711210243.GA1604@whir/

If you follow the link at the hunk header offset "+3,7",
it'll bring you to:

  https://public-inbox.org/git/8d27707/s/?b=http-walker.c#n4

  The bottom of that page has a a "debug log:" which tells
  how the blob is reconstructed using the email and pre-existing
  blob.

Since it can recreate blobs using patches, the next step is to
support showing "git diff" against reconstructed blobs with for
arbitrary contexts; but I got side-tracked from that earlier
this year...

(*) lore could configure coderepo associations, but that's a
    bear with the amount of repos kernel.org has...

> It's clear that whatever we do, it needs to be compatible with e-mail.
> That's very clear.  But it would be useful if we can support both the
> e-mail and web-based review.  There have some prototypes that have
> been floated which shows that it is at least possible; perhaps
> imperfectly, but something which provides a bidrectional gateway
> between those who perfer to use e-mail and those that prefer to use a
> web-based UI would be able to do it.

A hacker-oriented a webmail UI could be derived from
public-inbox and completely interoperable with other mail
servers (it would also support SMTP/IMAP, of course).

> There will be many potential kernel contributors who will be used to
> web-based UI's such as those that are available on github.  So while
> remaining e-mail compatible, having some way of allow as many
> operations to be done via web interfaces might help us get some newer
> developers who are more comfortable to living on the web than some of
> us more senior developers who remember when "gopher" was a text-based
> search engine, and not a mascot for the Go programming langauge.  :-)

Unfortunate, but yeah.  Any web-based UIs ought to include some
subtle (or maybe not-so-subtle) hints/pointers towards
cheaper-to-run-and-likely-more-powerful tools and practices.

I can't prove it, but it seems like public-inbox has been
successful at promoting the use of Message-IDs in URLs and
git-send-email :)