Re: patch submission process, was Re: [PATCH v6 06/16] merge_recursive: abort properly upon errors

Michael Haggerty venit, vidit, dixit 09.08.2016 01:20:

You're doing a great job differentiating between your roles as a member of the Git devel community and as a GitHub employee, so please keep the discussion here.

Maybe two more points of input for the discussion:

off-line capabilities =====================

The current workflow here seems to work best when you are subscribed to the git-ml and have your own (local, maybe selective) copy of git-ml in your (text-based) MUA (mutt, (al)pine, emacs, ...) that can jump right into git-am and such directly. I'm not sure how important the "off-line" aspect of that is for some of us, and how that could be replicated on GitHub - while PRs and such may be Git based behind the scenes there seems to be no way to clone that info and work from a local clone. (Don't know if GitLab is more open.)

My own setup ============

My usual MUA is Thunderbird because of its integration with calendars and address books. I usually read and post to mailing lists via nntp/gmane, that works best for me for several reasons (e.g. archive available when I need it).

For git-ml, I had to learn early on to answer by e-mail to git-ml rather than by nntp-reply because proper nntp-replies somehow didn't meet the expectations of the e-mail users (double copies because of the cc-policy or such, I don't remember).

I use git sendemail even for small throw-in patches because the git-ml does not allow attachments but wants patches (files) as in-line text, and Thunderbird possibly reformats text (because it's text, you know).

When I want to try out a proposed patch I have to "save message" and run git-am because patches don't come as file attachments on the git-ml (can't use "save/open attachment"+ git-apply) nor a PR (can't use git fetch nor view in browser). If it's a series, I have to do that for each invididual patch, which usually means I simply don't (or rely on Junio doing it and fetch his xy/topic branch).

And more often than not, patches from series do not appear in sequence, not threaded on top of the cover letter (in the gmane nntp version of git-ml), and it usually happens for the same people again and again, which tells me it's a git sendemail config issue and not gmane.

So really, everytime I interact with the git-ml I think about switching to mutt or such just for git-ml, even though over time I have gotten used to the number of hoops that I have to jump through if I want to interact with git-ml.

Suggestion ==========

Maybe the current gmane woes are a good reason to try out something different for a month or two, with copies to the git-ml, and with the default being to revert back to git-ml after that and discuss what we've learned. As a result we may improve our workflow here, get GitHub to improve, and maybe switch or not. Either way we could profit from that.

Michael