Re: help with distributed workflow/signoff

From: Brock Peabody <brock.peabody@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 14, 2010, 18:06 UTC
Message-ID: <loom.20100714T195109-665@post.gmane.org>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTimdVvKYPQn84IQvk7yxMo-gtrjWWqzN-ypXV78X@mail.gmail.com>

Hi Avery,

Avery Pennarun <apenwarr <at> gmail.com> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

> For an open source project, where most contributions are by volunteers
> and need to have their patches reviewed multiple times before
> submission - and frequently, more patchsets are rejected than applied
> - this works reasonably well.  For a company where (in my experience
> at least) most people's patches *are* applied, and the ratio of
> reviewers to coders is much lower, that's much less workable.  And
> unfortunately the elegant looking multiple-signed-off-by or acked-by
> lines don't work so well for that.

I think you've hit the nail on the head here. In our environment, commits are frequent and signoffs prompt. Revisions are very rarely rejected, and will never pass through more than one reviewer except in extreme cases. Contributors will have little tolerance for per-commit time or complexity overhead incurred from the process.

Show 5 quoted lines

> Oh, now that I think of it, you might find git-notes useful.  I've
> never used it but I understand it lets you add lines to the log
> messages retroactively.  Of course, that can be both a blessing and a
> curse.  If you can retroactively change signoffs, the signoffs aren't
> that valuable.

Actually, that might be exactly what we need. I'm sure we could set it up in such a way so that this signoff is only added mechanically, once, when a reviewer decides to add a revision to the 'master' repository.

Much thanks, Brock