[Mesa-dev] Workflow Proposal

[Jason Ekstrand]

On Wed, Oct 6, 2021 at 11:24 AM Emma Anholt <emma at anholt.net> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Oct 6, 2021 at 9:20 AM Mike Blumenkrantz
> <michael.blumenkrantz at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > It's recently come to my attention that gitlab has Approvals. Was anyone else aware of this feature? You can just click a button and have your name recorded in the system as having signed off on landing a patch? Blew my mind.
> >
> > So with that being said, we also have this thing in the Mesa repo where everyone* has to constantly be adding these esoteric tags like Reviewed-by (I reviewed it), and Acked-by (I rubber stamped it), or Tested-by (I compiled it and maybe ran glxgears), and so forth.
> >
> > * Except some incredibly smart people already know where I'm going with this
> >
> > Instead of continuing to have to manually update each patch with the appropriate and definitely-unforgeable tags, what if we just used Approvals in the UI instead? We could then have marge-bot require approvals as needed in components and bring reviewing into the current year. Just think: no more rewriting all the commit logs and force-pushing the branch again before you merge!
> >
> > Anyway, I thought maybe this would be a nice idea to improve everyone's workflows. What do other people think?

My primary grip with approvals or the 👍 button is that it's the wrong
granularity.  It's per-MR instead of per-patch.  When people are
regularly posting MRs that touch a bunch of different stuff, per-patch
review is pretty common.  I'm not sure I want to lose that.  :-/

--Jason

> I would love to see this be the process across Mesa.  We already don't
> rewrite commit messages for freedreno and i915g, and I only have to do
> the rebase (busy-)work for my projects in other areas of the tree.
>
> I don't think we should have marge-bot require approvals
> per-component, though.  There are times when an MR only incidentally
> touches a component (for example, changing function signatures in
> gallium), and actually getting a dev from every driver to sign off on
> it would be too much.