Re: [ANNOUNCE] git-series: track changes to a patch series over time

From: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
Date: Jul 29, 2016, 11:04 UTC
Message-ID: <20160729110426.GA2945@x>
In-Reply-To: <20160729101011.GA3469@salo>

On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 11:10:11AM +0100, Richard Ipsum wrote:

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> On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 11:40:55PM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote:
> [snip]
> > 
> > I'd welcome any feedback, whether on the interface and workflow, the
> > internals and collaboration, ideas on presenting diffs of patch series,
> > or anything else.
> > 
> 
> This looks awesome!
> 
> I've been working on some similar stuff for a while also.[1][2]
> 
> I'm particularly interested in trying to establish a standard for
> storing review data in git. I've got a prototype for doing that[3],
> and an example tool that uses it[4]. The tool is still incomplete/buggy though.

Looks promising, though!

> There seem to be a number of us trying to solve this in our different ways,
> it would be great to coordinate our efforts.

These definitely seem like a family of related problems. I'd like to use git-series as a format for storing iterations on things like GitHub pull-requests or Gerrit patch versions (in the latter case, overcoming Gerrit's limitations on only handling one patch at a time). Integrating reviews with that seems helpful.

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> The prototype library I have is partly the result of some discussion and work
> with the Gerrit folks, since they were thinking about this problem
> before I even started writing git-candidate, and solved it with Notedb.[5]
> 
> Let me know if you'd like to work together on this,

I'd love to.

I'll be presenting git-series at LinuxCon North America; will you be there by any chance? If not, perhaps we could meet by IRC or some other medium and talk about this family of problems.

I hope to use git notes with git-series in the future, by putting another gitlink under the git-series for notes related to the series. I'd intended that for more persistent notes; putting them in the series solves some of the problems related to notes refs, pushing/pulling, and collaboration. Using notes for review comments makes sense as well, whether in a series or in a separate ref.

> I've been considering taking the perl-notedb prototype and writing
> a C library for it with bindings for other languages (i.e. Rust).

A C library based on libgit2 seems like a good idea; ideally the bindings could interoperate with git2-rs. (Alternatively, Rust can *export* a C interface, so you could write directly with git2-rs. :) )

One of the items on my long-term TODO list is a completely federated GitHub; I've been looking at other aspects of that, but federated reviews/comments/etc seem critical to that as well.

- Josh Triplett