Re: Git pull ack emails..

Jacek Anaszewski
2018-10-23T20:41:37Z

On 10/23/2018 02:13 PM, Ulf Hansson wrote:
> On 23 October 2018 at 10:41, Linus Torvalds
> <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>> So I've obviously started pulling stuff for the merge window, and one
>> of the things I noticed with Greg doing it for the last few weeks was
>> that he has this habit (or automation) to send Ack emails when he
>> pulls.
>>
>> In fact, I reacted to them not being there when he sent himself his
>> fake pull messages. Because he didn't then send himself an ack for
>> having pulled it ;(
>>
>> And I actually went into this saying "I'll try to do the same".
>>
>> But after having actually started doing the pulls, I notice how it
>> doesn't work well with my traditional workflow, and so I haven't been
>> doing it after all.
>>
>> In particular, the issue is that after each pull, I do a build test
>> before the pull is really "final", and while that build test is
>> ongoing (which takes anything from a few minutes to over an hour when
>> I'm on the road and using my laptop), I go on and look at the *next*
>> pull (or one of the other pending ones).
>>
>> So by the time the build test has finished, the original pull request
>> is already long gone - archived and done - and I have moved on.
>>
>> End result: answering the pull request is somewhat inconvenient to my
>> flow, which is why I haven't done it.
>>
>> In contrast, this email is written "after the fact", just scripting
>> "who did I pull for and then push out" by just looking at the git
>> tree. Which sucks, because it means that I don't actually answer the
>> original email at all, and thus lose any cc's for other people or
>> mailing lists. That would literally be done better by simple
>> automation.
>>
>> So I've got a few options:
>>
>> - just don't do it
>>
>> - acking the pull request before it's validated and finalized.
>>
>> - starting the reply when doing the pull, leaving the email open in a
>> separate window, going on to the next pull request, and then when
>> build tests are done and I'll start the next one, finish off the old
>> pending email.
>>
>> and obviously that first option is the easiest one. I'm not sure what
>> Greg did, and during the later rc's it probably doesn't matter,
>> because there likely simply aren't any overlapping operations.
>>
>> Because yes, the second option likely works fine in most cases, but my
>> pull might not actually be final *if* something goes bad (where bad
>> might be just "oops, my tests showed a semantic conflict, I'll need to
>> fix up my merge" to "I'm going to have to look more closely at that
>> warning" to "uhhuh, I'm going to just undo the pull entirely because
>> it ended up being broken").
>>
>> The third option would work reliably, and not have the "oh, my pull is
>> only tentatively done" issue. It just adds an annoying back-and-forth
>> switch to my workflow.
>>
>> So I'm mainly pinging people I've already pulled to see how much
>> people actually _care_. Yes, the ack is nice, but do people care
>> enough that I should try to make that workflow change? Traditionally,
>> you can see that I've pulled from just seeing the end result when it
>> actually hits the public tree (which is yet another step removed from
>> the steps above - I do build tests between every pull, but I generally
>> tend to push out the end result in batches, usually a couple of times
>> a day).
>>
>> Comments?
>
> Welcome back!
>
> I have no strong opinions, in regards to the acks.
>
> Your current approach, with no ack at all, just means that I have to
> do "git remote update" a few times, which I probably would have done
> anyways. So, to me, feel free to pick whatever option that makes the
> life easiest for you.

Same for me, I do the update anyway to see if and how my pull request
has been merged.

--
Best regards,
Jacek Anaszewski