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

[Ilia Mirkin]

A few thoughts. Given past experience, I don't really expect these to
have any serious impact on the direction taken, but I also don't want
to just sit brooding in silence. Please note that full time/paid
contributors probably have a different view of things than volunteer
contributors. There's not a ton of the latter left.

1. Emailed patches allow me to quickly and easily keep track of what's
going on, and provide feedback where necessary. In under 5 seconds, I
can evaluate whether a patch is of interest to me (usually much faster
than that), and it ends up in my email which I already look at. Going
to gitlab to look at this stuff is just not going to happen for me. If
reviews all move to gitlab, I just won't do reviews, and will know a
lot less about what's going on across the repository.

2. I've seen a bunch of things land where I would have had comments
beforehand. Once the patch is in, I don't really have an easy way to
provide feedback. In the past if such a thing would happen, I just
take the subject of the patch, pop it into the search in gmail, and
reply to the email. It's unclear what I should do now -- for most
things thus far, just pinging on IRC has worked out, but there's
nowhere to either see the discussion that led to the change nor to
provide post-commit feedback. In most places where I've done "tracked"
reviews, there's linkage in the commit message to be able to find the
reviews in the review system.

3. Given the present state, where not everyone looks at gitlab,
patches going through it are getting less review than they would on
the ML. If entire subsystems agree to exclusively go through gitlab --
fine. However at this point, core mesa, st/mesa, and gallium patches
are sneaking through without being seen pre-commit by the people who
normally review such things.

Cheers,

  -ilia

On Fri, Jan 11, 2019 at 11:57 AM Jason Ekstrand <jason at jlekstrand.net> 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?
>
> --Jason
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