[libreoffice-projects] [ANN] Please use Gerrit from now on for Patch Review

[Bjoern Michaelsen]

Hi Petr,

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 06:14:18PM +0200, Petr Mladek wrote:
> Ah, this bug is about a daily digest. I think that we first need to
> decide how much we want to modify the current work flow. Do we want to
> really move most discussions from the mailing list to gerrit?

IMHO yes, they are noise on the mailing list as you need deep context to follow
them. In gerrit you can even comment inline in the patch.

> How people will be noticed about news in gerrit?

Reporters and Reviewer will get mails about "their" patches. Unless they prefer
a different workflow in which case they can change their preferences. A lot
better than what we have now.

> Is one day digest really enough?

For the mailing list, yes. But I might make sense to teach one of our IRC bots
to blurp out updates in realtime to #libreoffice-dev.
One might consider it useful to send _one_ mail to the list once the patch goes
in with a summary of the history, but I personally guess the majority is not
interested in reading that and the few that are can look it up in gerrits web
interface.

> Also, you know, there is the "hello/thanks/see you" much more involved
> in the mailing list. I think that such things are important for the
> community live.

Well, we should still try to get people on the mailing list (and it will be
easier with less traffic there). Asking a first-time contributor to subscribe
(and send his license blurp) is a good thing. A lot of volunteers told me
though they unsubscribed because of the volume of mails on the dev list. And
the PATCH mails arent exactly those that are socially attractive.

> 	+ setup mail notifications to the developer mailing list

Yes, and Robert is on that bug (ETA: next week). Otherwise, I will jump in.

> 	+ setup patch drop mailbox
yes, on my todo and halfway there:
 https://launchpad.net/~r-gerrit-0 (bot-id)
 gerrit at libreoffice.org (bot email)

Design proposals on the email format etc. welcome.


> 	+ scripting to automagically identify patches on the mailing
>           list

IMHO, we should drop that in favor of explicit forward to
gerrit at libreoffice.org. "Guessing" the target branch is tricky, and a simple
forward (with possibly tweaking the subject to something botreadable) shouldnt
be too hard. 

> For inspiration, I attach mail from the openSUSE Build Service. It
> includes:
> 
> 	+ description of changes
> 	+ diff of the spec file
> 	+ commands how to get full diff, approve or reject the change

I still think we should reduce the traffic on the dev ml, but having that as
IRC bot would be nice. Such mails are kinda nice for full-time employees, but
for everyone else they are overkill IMHO.

Best,

Bjoern