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

From: Eric Wong <e@80x24.org>
Date: Aug 1, 2016, 21:19 UTC
Message-ID: <20160801211938.GA16348@dcvr>
In-Reply-To: <20160801085928.lw3ltdksyrjujutu@x>

Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org> wrote:

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> On Mon, Aug 01, 2016 at 07:55:54AM +0000, Eric Wong wrote:
> > Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 12:10 PM, Richard Ipsum
> > > <richard.ipsum@codethink.co.uk> wrote:
> > > > 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.
> > 
> > > > 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.

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> > I'm not convinced another format/standard is needed besides the
> > email workflow we already use for git and kernel development.
> 
> Not all projects use a patches-by-email workflow, or want to.  To the
> extent that tools and projects use some other workflow, standardizing
> the format they use to store patch reviews (including per-line
> annotations, approvals, test results, etc) seems preferable to having
> each tool use its own custom format.

I think standardizing on email conventions (such as what we already do with format-patch, request-pull, S-o-b trailers) would be a step in this direction and a good step to take.

But yeah, I also hope git adopters can somehow be convinced to also adopt the workflow that built git itself.

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> > I also see the reliance on an after-the-fact search engine
> > (which can be tuned/replaced) as philosophically inline with
> > what git does, too, such as not having rename tracking and
> > doing delayed deltafication.
> 
> Storing review data in git doesn't mean it needs to end up in the
> history of the project itself; it can use after-the-fact annotations on
> a commit.

Right. So on public-inbox.org/git today, one could search for after-the-fact annotations based on commit titles and maybe exact commit ID matches.

A future goal might be to get search indexing working on commit ID substrings. So finding references to commit deadbeefcafe01234567890123467890abcdef00 could be done by searching for "commit deadbeefcafe" or even a shorter ID, and the following results could still be returned:

  1. commit deadbeefcafe broke my cat feeder
  2. commit deadbeef killed my cow

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> > Email also has the advantage of having existing tooling, and
> > being (at least for now) federated without a single point of
> > failure.
> 
> Storing review data in git makes it easy to push and pull it, which can
> provide the basis for a federated system.

Every public-inbox exposed over HTTP(S) is git clonable[1], so it's possible to push/pull or have developers merge/combine inboxes with index-only operations. There's no UI for that, yet, and having a working tree checked out is inefficient with 300K uncompressed mails...

But there needs to be way to message others about the existence of new pushes/pull-requests/reviews/etc; including users unable to clone or host 800M git repos; so that messaging system might as well be email.

[1] git clone --mirror https://public-inbox.org/git/
    That's not efficient, yet, though, at around 800M when the
    gzipped fast-export dump is around half that:
    https://public-inbox.org/git/20160710034745.GA20270@dcvr.yhbt.net/T/#u