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

[Lionel Elie Mamane]

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 02:34:13PM +0200, Bjoern Michaelsen wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 02:11:31PM +0200, Stephan Bergmann wrote:

>> Still, this removes the comments from many people's (potential)
>> sight. The IMO big advantage of the "everything on a single mailing
>> list" approach is that everybody is forced ;) to see everything
>> (modulo information overload)

> I can assure you that I am not forced to see your comments on the mailing
> list. Indeed, unless I am on CC or the subject sounds very thrilling the mail
> body never passes my eye.

Exactly: this is not about *forcing* people to see, but about a "push"
model rather than a "pull" model. With publish-to-ML, it is "push" and
we can "easily" (for some value of "easily") sort out what to look at
from the subject line.

Gerrit seemingly gets us to a "pull" model; we have to go look for
patches to review, be it on the web interface or by command-line
query. It becomes a separate action from reading the ML.

What I fear the most in that is that I have no way to mark a patch as
"I won't review it, not my area / I don't know / don't understand /
...". With publish-to-ML, I just mark the post / whole thread as
"read". With gerrit, I fear I will see the same patch ever and ever
again in my queries...

And the "gerrit daily digest" idea floating around is not really,
really helpful there, exactly because we lose the capacity of scanning
for interesting patches by subject and the capacity to individually
mark patches as "not to be looked at again".

We already have separate libreoffice-commits and libreoffice-bugs
mailing lists so as not to flood the "main" development mailing list
with those; maybe we could use a "libreoffice-review" mailing list to
get *one* mail for each gerrit action? Gerrit action = +1/-1 validate,
+1/+2/-1/-2 codereview, gerrit automatic push, comment added, patch
changed, new patch, ... And all emails concerning one patch/change in
one thread, just like the bugzilla mails for one bug are all in one
thread.

I'd subscribe to such a mailing list (and obviously quickly scan by
subject and not read most threads).

As I review very few patches, keeping me happy in this respect is
probably not high priority, except maybe as a long tail argument (if
we have 100 committers reviewing one patch per two months, that's
still 600 reviews per year... Worth having for the project).

-- 
Lionel