Re: Improve or change devel mailing-list for improve efficiency and spending less time, is this possible?

["Roger Pau Monné" <roger.pau@citrix.com>]

El 03/10/15 a les 21.35, Julien Grall ha escrit:
> Hi,
> 
> On 30/09/2015 15:02, Ian Campbell wrote:
>> On Wed, 2015-09-30 at 15:49 +0200, Fabio Fantoni wrote:
>>> I still not found a good and "all-in-one" solution but I saw this open
>>> source project: patchwork http://jk.ozlabs.org/projects/patchwork/
>>> Seems interesting, is integrated with mailing list, now seems with
>>> "basic features" but probably in future it could become great.
>>> I same that many open source project already use it, has someone here
>>> already tried it in other projects? If yes what do you think?
>>
>> I've used it in my role as a u-boot custodian and I think it is "meh".
>> It's
>> ok but it really requires everyone (i.e. all maintainers) to buy into
>> using
>> it and to be disciplined about doing so and it does need frequent tending
>> and gardening otherwise it tends to accumulate cruft.
>>
>> IME the command line clients leave something to be desired and the
>> workflow
>> for actually applying a patch from p/w is rather clumsy, in particular
>> there is no easy way to access git-am's --reject option, other than
>> using a
>> temporary file.
>>
>> I don't think it would be a good fit for us.
> 
> I'm wondering if a tool like Phabricator [1] would help here. It offers
> both interface and command line [2] to review, download a series...
> 
> I've just started to use it with FreeBSD and I find very handy for the
> contributors as you can keep track of comment addressed and see
> difference between revision...
> 
> I've added Roger who is using it more often than me.

FWIW, I think Phabricator is a good option, it has some features which I
find helpful:

 - Allows upload of patches directly from git using command line tools
(much like git send-email).
 - Has a nice split view of changes.
 - Allows commenting inline.
 - Allows the submitter to take actions on comments (marking them as
done, not possible...).
 - You can create groups of people (like "x86 hypervisor maintainers")
and assign reviews to them.
 - If properly configured Phabricator knows when reviews are committed
and automatically closes them.
 - Detects interactions between patches.

It has drawbacks however:

 - Indentation sometimes is mangled when viewing patches from the browser.
 - Comments/reviews can only be done using the web interface.
 - Everyone would have to switch the workflow, I don't know anyway to
get it integrated with mailing lists.
 - I don't know how much customization/hacking the FreeBSD Phabricator
instance has been beaten with in order to have it behave properly.
 - IMHO it is more suited for a workflow were submitters are also
committers, since patches can be easily accepted by maintainers and
committed by the author. I'm now sure how hard it would be for
committers to fetch all accepted patches and commit them.

Roger.