Re: xenbits GitHub mirror?

[George Dunlap <george.dunlap@citrix.com>]

On 27/01/16 15:45, Ian Campbell wrote:
> On Wed, 2016-01-27 at 15:18 +0000, Lars Kurth wrote:
>>> Doug says that you can mark a repo as a 'mirror', which will prevent
>>> people from being able to send pull requests to it; so I think my
>>> technical objection has been answered.
>>>
>>> I think the idea is still only half-baked though, as I'm not sure how
>>> having a github mirror will make it so that most mail has a git repo
>>> you can pull from (which would be necessary to reach the ultimate
>>> goal, making it straightforward to apply patches sent to the list).
>>
>>
>> I would be good, if we could identify any workflow issues (e.g. such as
>> the mailing issue raised here). Maybe some of the people who have hands-on
>> experience with Github and mailing lists can make a few suggestions. We
>> then should also consider adding this to the How to submit patches wiki
>> page
> 
> I don't think we want to encourage this for all submissions, nor dive too
> deeply into the workflows (given that Doug says we can disable GH PRs for
> the repo).
> 
> All Doug is trying to address is for the (infrequent) occasions when a
> series is particularly big and complicated to be able to say "please stick
> this in a git tree to ease review, oh and by the way if you need git
> hosting you could fork $this repo on github or $that repo on gitlab".

Right -- I see how this could help contributors contribute in a useful
fashion.

> For most patch series setting up a GH account and pushing the changes to it
> etc is pure overhead (or at least optional), there is no need to encourage
> it for most series, nor even necessarily to encourage people to proactively
> push to a repo, we can always ask if we find the series to hard to review
> as patches.

It did take me a while to find a system that made it not a pain to apply
patch series from xen-devel, and the solution I have now is very
particular to the combination of e-mail tools that I happen to use; I'm
not sure how transferrable they are.

So while I've managed to get things to a point where I don't have much
pain, it's probably something that could use some work as a project in
general.  "Encouraging most people to include public git branches" is
one option to help that; "Having a mail bot that gave you git-am'able
mbox files" is another.

 -George