Re: Git in Outreachy?

From: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Date: Sep 9, 2020, 18:26 UTC
Message-ID: <20200909182617.GA14981@nand.local>
In-Reply-To: <20200903060041.GH4035286@google.com>

Hi Jonathan,

Thanks for suggesting a great list of ideas. I don't have strong opinions on most of the above, so I'll save you a bunch of 'ack's and just talk about the ones that I do:

On Wed, Sep 02, 2020 at 11:00:41PM -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

> I think setting up something like snowpatch[*] to run CI on patches
> that have hit the mailing list but not yet hit "seen" might be a good
> project for an interested applicant (and I'd be interested in
> co-mentoring if we find a taker).

To be honest, I'm not crazy about this one. We already have a system in place that works well (GitHub Actions) that allows people to run CI on their patches automatically at no cost.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't have another because of sticking to one provider or another, but there has been a reasonable amount of churn there, and what's in-tree now seems to be working quite well.

The goal of providing CI easily to new contributors should be to make it as *easy* as possible to test their patches, and adding an additional decision (i.e., "should I use GitHub Actions, or Snowpatch?") seems counter-intuitive.

> - formats: on-disk reverse idx

As a heads up, I think that I am going to start working on (an alternative to) this myself, so it may be worth pushing future Outreachy interns in a different direction.

> Jonathan
>
> [*] https://github.com/ruscur/snowpatch

Thanks, Taylor