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

[Kenneth Graunke]

On Monday, January 28, 2019 11:29:00 AM PST Ilia Mirkin wrote:
> 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.

Hey Ilia,

Have you tried turning on notifications?

    1. Go to https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa
    2. Log in (if you haven't already)
    3. Click the alarm icon in the center of the page, hit "Custom",
       and check all the boxes for merge requests.

Then you'll start receiving emails from gitlab at gitlab.freedesktop.org
(under the submitter's name), with X-GitLab-* headers you can filter on,
if you want them filtered into a different email folder like mesa-dev.

This way, I can see all merge requests, and discussion activity, all
in email threads in my inbox.  I don't see every patch, but I do see
every series, and only need to "go to gitlab" if a series passes my
"I should think about reviewing this" threshold.  (And then, there's
a link in the email to take me directly to the thing I want to see.)

One nice improvement over the old approach, IMO, is that it sends an
email when a MR is merged or closed.  So, I can quickly look at the last
email in a thread, and see "oh, this is done" and mark the whole thread
as read.  (In the past, I'd have to look at git to see if any commits
matching the subject landed to know whether patches were still awaiting
review or had landed.)

Ideally I hope to have a maildir filter I can run which detects "this
has been merged / closed" and marks threads as read for me, so I can
more quickly tidy my inbox, but I haven't written that yet.

I agree with you that having to "go to gitlab" and poll every day for
new activity would be pretty prohibitive.  But I've been pretty happy
with the notification mechanism and keeping an eye on things via email.

> 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.

That's fair.  In the past, I've seen some of the VMware folks reply to
emails on the mesa-commits list, CC'ing mesa-dev.  That's not a bad
plan still, though it requires subscribing to another firehose list.

I think just emailing mesa-dev and CC'ing the author is reasonable.
We can and should still have email discussions.

>From reading Caio's email here...
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2019-January/214014.html
...it sounds we've basically got a git script we can use to get from a
commit back to the MR discussion page, in case you want to see any
review that happened.

> 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.

Yeah...that's not good.  I'm hopeful this is a temporary problem...

--Ken
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