[Mesa-dev] [MR] Update README to recommend MRs instead of `git send-email`

[Eric Engestrom]

On Saturday, 2019-07-06 13:39:16 -0400, Ilia Mirkin wrote:
> I see this as driving away contributions, esp from new people. MR's
> are annoying to create, since they require dealing with the hosting
> provider, getting it to host clones, etc. Everyone has email.

MRs have a one-time cost of having to create an account and forking the
repo, I agree, although I really don't understand why a couple of you
guys consider that cost so high...

Anyway, we're not talking about preventing people from sending patches
via email, or even just telling people not to do that, we are simply
updating the recommendation for people who don't know where to start.

As for "driving away contributions", we have noticed the exact opposite,
which is exactly what we expected since that's what everyone else had
been reporting as well: web interfaces instead of email make it much
*easier* for new people to submit patches, which translated into many
new people sending patches since we enabled MRs.

On the technical side, MRs also allow things like the pre-merge CI to
make sure we don't accidentally break the build for other people, and
that alone is enough for many of us to want to eventually not let anyone
push anything that hasn't gone through that CI, so while this is *not*
what we're talking about here, let's be clear that it's the end-goal for
many of us.

> 
> Cheers,
> 
>   -ilia
> 
> On Sat, Jul 6, 2019 at 7:41 AM Eric Engestrom <eric at engestrom.ch> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I sent an MR to update the README, but as pointed out there I should
> > make sure people who don't look at MRs are also aware of it, so here is:
> >
> > https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/merge_requests/1223
> >
> > ---8<---
> > diff --git a/README.rst b/README.rst
> > index 4ccd72eca38a0845571c..eba097e652edde48a735 100644
> > --- a/README.rst
> > +++ b/README.rst
> > @@ -56,5 +56,6 @@ Contributions are welcome, and step-by-step instructions can be found in our
> >  documentation (`docs/submittingpatches.html
> >  <https://mesa3d.org/submittingpatches.html>`_).
> >
> > -Note that Mesa uses email mailing-lists for patches submission, review and
> > -discussions.
> > +We recommend using GitLab Merge Requests (MRs) for patch submission and
> > +review, and email mailing-lists for discussions, but the old `git send-email`
> > +method is still accepted.
> > --->8---
> > _______________________________________________
> > mesa-dev mailing list
> > mesa-dev at lists.freedesktop.org
> > https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-dev