Re: thoughts on a Merge Request based development workflow

[Daniel Axtens <dja@axtens.net>]

Don Zickus <dzickus@redhat.com> writes:

> On Mon, Oct 07, 2019 at 09:17:04PM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
>> On Tue, 08 Oct 2019 10:00:03 +1100
>> Daniel Axtens <dja@axtens.net> wrote:
>> 
>> > Non-email systems have an easier time of this: with gerrit (which I'm
>> > not a big fan of, but just take it as an example) you push things up to
>> > a git repository, and it requires a change-id. So you can track the base
>> > tree, dependencies, and patch revisions easily, because you build on a
>> > richer, more structured data source.
>> 
>> I believe we all want a new system that can handle this, but still be
>> able to work with email. Patchwork requires to read all emails and
>> figure out what to do with it. This workflow doesn't need to do that.
>> But it should be able to send out emails on comments, and a reply to
>> one of those should easily be put back into the system.
>> 
>> As for adding patches, we can push to a git tree or something that the
>> tool could read. It's much easier to know what to do with a branch then
>> email. A rebase could be a new version of the series (and we should
>> probably archive the original version).
>
> Thanks for the thoughts.  Your thoughts here and your bugzilla example make
> sense and ties into some of the work we are experimenting with, with a small
> group at Red Hat.  My only sticky point is the initial patch submission.
> Pushing to a forge like github, gerrit, or gitlab makes a ton of sense like
> you said above.  But what do we do with folks who still email patches
> initially (instead of the git-push)?
>
> What should be the expectations there?  Leverage patchwork to create a 'git
> push'?  Reject the patchset?  Something else?  Curious.

Normally I would say "the patchwork API makes this really easy" but I
got sick of saying it, so I thought I'd just demonstrate instead.

It takes less than 100 lines of python.

https://github.com/daxtens/forge-bridge

Currently running against the powerpc list and pushing all new series to
my github: https://github.com/daxtens/linux/branches

The really tricky bit is the comment bridge - syncing comments between
the forge and the ML is legitimately tricky.

For the reasons Konstantin identifies, I'm not sure that this is the
path we want to go down, but I think there's a lot of value in keeping
these discussions practical, at least in part.

>
> Thanks!
>
> Cheers,
> Don