Re: What's cooking in git.git (Aug 2017, #05; Tue, 22)

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Sep 19, 2017, 15:43 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.21.1.1709191733450.219280@virtualbox>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqbmm7s9ja.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

Hi Junio,

On Tue, 19 Sep 2017, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 25 quoted lines

> Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:
> 
> >> Do you have a concrete suggestion to make these individual entries
> >> more helpful for people who may want go back to the original thread
> >> in doing so?  In-reply-to: or References: fields of the "What's
> >> cooking" report would not help.  I often have the message IDs that
> >> made/helped me make these individual comments in the description;
> >> they alone would not react to mouse clicks, though.
> >
> > Oh gawd, not even more stuff piled onto the mail format. Please stop.
> > ...
> > It probably tries to serve too many purposes at the same time, and
> > thereby none.
> 
> Well, this was started as my attempt to give a public service that shows
> a summary of what is happening in the entire integration tree, as there
> was nothing like that before (and going to github.com and looking at
> 'pu' branch would not give you an easy overview).  As many people
> contribute many topics to the project, complaining that it talks about
> too many topics would not get you anywhere.
> 
> If you find "What's cooking" report not serving your needs, and if no
> one finds it not serving his or her needs, then I can stop sending these
> out, of course, but I am not getting the impression that we are at that
> point, at least not yet.

C'mon, don't *try* to misunderstand me.

Of course there need to be updates as to the state of patch series.

It's just that mails only go *so* far when you need to connect and aggregate information. You need the connection between the original patch series, the latest unaddressed reviews, links to the branches, history of the patch series' iterations, and ideally links to the repositories of the contributors with *their* branch names. And then, of course, your verdict as to the state of the patch series and your expectation what happens next.

To relate that, you are using a plain text format that is not well defined and not structured, and certainly not machine-readable, for information that is crucial for project management.

What you need is a tool to aggregate this information, to help working with it, to manage the project, and to be updated automatically. And to publish this information continuously, without costing you extra effort.

I understand that you started before GitHub existed, and before GitHub was an option, the script-generated What's cooking mail was the best you could do.

Ciao, Dscho