Re: Git pull ack emails..

Mark Brown
2018-10-23T09:19:26Z

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On Tue, Oct 23, 2018 at 09:41:32AM +0100, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> 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.

I have a script that sends people rather lengthy "applied" e-mails when
I push things out with a lot of process blurb that new contributors
might need. It tries to use patchwork to get the message ID and CC
list, though it will just fall back to scraping from git. In my case
it's mainly there to help new contributors know what's going on but a
lot of other people have said they find them useful.

> 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).

It doesn't urgently bother me personally, honestly I was a bit alarmed
the first time Greg sent me an ack - your usual workflow is that if
there's any mail it means that there's a problem. So long as it's
consistent.

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