Re: Pain points in Git's patch flow

On 2021-04-14 08:13, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

Thanks for bringing up these questions in a dedicated format. I'll take this as an opportunity to share my thoughts on this topic, which have accompanied me for quite a while.

Well, it's email-based. As a result it's error prone to things like formatting / quoting issues, putting the right people it CC, etc.

I have always wondered why Git core development does not start to make use of the Git ecosystem that we have by now, esp. in the form of review tools / platforms like GitHub (via pull-requests), GitLab (via merge-requests), or Gerrit (via patches). From these, Gerrit would IMO be the best fit for Git, due to its capability to cope well with rebase-workflows. Those tools avoid things like formatting / quoting issues completely, and shift the responsibility of assigning reviewers from the contributor to the tool, where people can subscribe to code changes or code ownership can be defined and automatically taken into account.

Sure, I get that that the contribution workflow to Git core has historically grown, but what concerns me is that the efforts to "bridge" the contribution workflow to the "modern world" seem to go into the wrong direction: Tools like submitgit [1], gitgitgadget [2] and now patchwork [3] were created / are considered for use to allow the legacy email path workflow to remain, but also allow more "GUI minded" people to contribute. While this has worked quite well for some time, and esp. gitgitgadget [2] seems to haven gotten popular, I wonder whether it's now the time to "swap the default", and make a patch / contribution tool with a GUI the standard, and bridge the legacy workflow by using / creating tooling that makes it convenient to use those modern tools from the CLI, instead of the opposite.

None. I simply have stopped contributing to Git core, to be frank.

No. To me, this is yet another effort that tries to come up with a work-around instead of fixing the root cause: It tries to lift the limitations of an email-based contribution workflow instead of getting rid of the email-based contribution workflow altogether.

Currently, only Gerrit [4] comes to my mind, as a complete substitute for the email-based contribution workflow.

[1] https://github.com/rtyley/submitgit [2] https://github.com/gitgitgadget/gitgitgadget [3] http://jk.ozlabs.org/projects/patchwork [4] https://www.gerritcodereview.com