[Mesa-dev] Thoughts after hitting 100 merge requests?

[Erik Faye-Lund]

On Thu, 2019-01-17 at 08:38 +0100, Erik Faye-Lund wrote:
> On Fri, 2019-01-11 at 10:57 -0600, Jason Ekstrand wrote:
> > All,
> > 
> > The mesa project has now hit 100 merge requests (36 are still
> > open). 
> > I (and I'm sure others) would be curious to hear people's initial
> > thoughts on the process.  What's working well?  What's not
> > working? 
> > Is it total fail and should we go back to mailing lists?
> > 
> 
> So, overall I think it works pretty well. I have some things I think
> maybe we could do better, some of which has already been pointed out:
> 
> 1. New MRs should probably get their cover-letter automatically sent
> to
> the mailing list for incrased visibility.

OK, I think that after having enabled e-mail notifications and spent
some time setting up mail filters, this is much less of a pressing
issue for me personally. I'm not even sure I think this is worth the
time any more, as the notification support in GitLab is *really* good,
and allows nice and finely-grained control, much better than what an
automatic mail-bot could do.

This doesn't mean that I would opose it, though. Just that I think I
would strike this from *my* personal list of things to improve.

> 2. Perhaps we should ban sending MRs from the main mesa repo? With
> gitlab, it's trivial to make your own fork, and you can delegate
> permissions to other users for collaborators. I don't think there's
> any
> reason to clutter up the main mesa repo with all kinds of branches.
> But
> it seems some people send their MRs from the main-repo anyway.
> Perhaps
> we should document that this isn't how to send MRs?

I've sent out a patch to add a note about this.

> 3. There's some browsing-pain with the commit list. For instance, I
> always second-guess if the latest commit is at the top or bottom.
> Some
> times this is not a problem due to timestamps, but sometimes this
> isn't
> clear from that either. I also tend to get a bit lost in context.
> Some
> of this is probably habit, though.
> 

And I don't really think this is a big deal, especially after the
discussion on this point below; GitHub is the oddball here, and that's
not GitLab's fault.

So all in all, I think all of my issues with the process has been
resolved (assuming we land the patch with the MR-note in some form, and
if we don't that's probably also for a good reason).

So from my point of view, I would love to see us move to a MR-only
workflow as soon as possible. Doing both is a little bit messy (as was
anticipated).