[Mesa-dev] [PATCH v2] docs: Document GitLab merge request process (email alternative)

[Eric Anholt]

Jason Ekstrand <jason at jlekstrand.net> writes:

> On Thu, Dec 13, 2018 at 11:07 AM Axel Davy <davyaxel0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 13/12/2018 17:57, Mathias Fröhlich wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> > Initially it seemed to me that I am about the only one sticking with
>> mailing lists.
>> > And I personally feel like a too small contributor to really try to
>> influence your
>> > decisions too much. But these recent hand full of mails all tell me that
>> I am not
>> > that alone. I personally did contribute to several projects during the
>> past years.
>> > All that only in part time, thus it had to be *very* efficient for
>> myself. And that is
>> > something that I achieved by a consistent 'interface' to all those
>> projects. Just
>> > my widely used and highly convenient mail client. So, all that worked in
>> a sufficiently
>> > efficient way because I could combine this kind of 'work' even with my
>> private mail
>> > that I could handle in between with that single 'interface'. So going to
>> any web site
>> > there is already a detour and having multiple of them for each such
>> project gives an
>> > even longer detour. Okay today it's mostly mesa that is left as well as
>> a communication
>> > middle end used in vizsim applications. But going away too far away from
>> a mailing list
>> > will be mostly a loss of efficiency for me.
>> > As I said, my two cents, that should not keep you all from doing changes
>> that finally
>> > increase your all efficiency ...
>> >
>> > best
>> >
>> > Mathias
>> >
>> >
>> >
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>>
>> I have to add my voice here as well.
>>
>> Even though I do not feel able to give review for most of the mesa code
>> base,
>> I appreciate to have all patches in the mailing list in my mail client.
>>
>>  From time to time, I give feedback for some set of patches, for example
>> when I see patches related to dri3 or that could impact Nine.
>>
>> It also enables me to get an overview of all the recent works and new
>> features Nine could use.
>>
>> I feel like if most patches go through MR without getting a mail
>> feedback, I would not be able to do those as efficiently.
>>
>
> I find it interesting that multiple people have had this same sentiment.
> For me, the exact opposite is true.  I'm someone who is responsible for
> tracking and reviewing dozens of series at a time often with many patches
> each.  My current review backlog is probably 200 patches or more.  Having
> them in a linear stream in my mail isn't at all what I want because once I
> blow past the first page (50 e-mails) stuff easily gets lost.  The ability
> to look at them at the series level, filter by tags, etc. is a huge
> advantage.  I also really like the fact that GitLab pulls all the comments
> for the series together which makes cross-patch discussions easier to track.

Complete agreement here.  I'm both a regular contributor to Mesa (I've
been in Jason's position before 100s-of-patches review backlog), and an
occasional contributor to other projects (xserver is currently
"occasional" status, unfortunately).  I've found MRs to be better at
tracking outsanding review for me than email, and I even use the email
client written by cworth to try to solve this problem for us.

> You can subscribe to an individual label and it will e-mail you every time
> a MR is posted and tagged with that label.  Now, it will probably take a
> bit before we get label discipline sufficient that you can rely on it but
> the mechanism is there.

I'm curious if we can do something with this to replace discipline with
software:

https://about.gitlab.com/2016/08/19/applying-gitlab-labels-automatically/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 832 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/attachments/20181213/78a93408/attachment.sig>