Killing the gerrit to dev-list spam ...

[Bjoern Michaelsen]

Hi, 

On Tue, May 07, 2013 at 05:13:53PM +0200, Stephan Bergmann wrote:
> But upon yet further reflection, it appears to me that mail does hit
> a sweet spot there.  Like with git commits, where in principle one
> can stay informed via git fetch/git log.  But, at least to me, it
> appears way more practical to instead do that via the
> automatically-fed commit ML:  My mail reader keeps track of which
> commits I did not yet look at.  I can flag commits as interesting to
> come back to them later when I have more time (though that typically
> means: never).  I can easily compose a reply mail to comment on a
> commit, and if I include the general ML in that mail, this can start
> a useful discussion.  In short, it is a format that makes it easy to
> consume the information and to contribute to it.  A counter-example
> is your average bug-tracker, which is not mail-based, but still can
> give you the feeling that you are on top of the information (and I
> think an important part there is that the bug-tracker makes all the
> information about a single bug immediately visible on a single web
> page).

I agree that gerrit doesnt give much added value for a full-time employed
LibreOffice dev over the mails it churns out, except for that it reliably
tracks if a patch is in or not.

However, for a casual contributor, its website provides a good way to consume
and contribute as much as you want or need (even as the UI could indeed be
improved with lots of tweaks) -- and grow with that.

So gerrit allows casual contributors to pull information as needed, while its
output to a dedicated ML allows staying on top for highly involved contributors
(like the commits ML or bugzilla status mails do). While there is much room for
improvement, currently no alternative that accomodates both scenarios in a
decent way.

Best,

Bjoern