Re: Our cumbersome mailing list workflow

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Dec 1, 2014, 02:46 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqh9xgrssc.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <547895F1.1010307@alum.mit.edu>

Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

> It seems like a few desirable features are being talked about here, and
> summarizing the discussion as "centralized" vs "decentralized" is too
> simplistic. What is really important?
>
> 1. Convenient and efficient, including for newcomers
> 2. Usable while offline
> 3. Usable in pure-text mode
> 4. Decentralized
>
> Something else?

As a reviewer / contributor (not speaking as the top maintainer), I would say that everything in one place, and for that one place mailbox is preferrable.

"Somebody commented on (this instance of | the central) Gerrit, come look at it" is not usable; sending that comment out to those who work in their MUA, and allowing them to respond via their MUA probably adding their response as a new comment to Gerrit) would be usable.

When I had to view a large-ish series by Ronnie on Gerrit, it was fairly painful. The interaction on an individual patch might be more convenient and efficient using a system like Gerrit than via e-mailed patch with reply messages, but as a vehicle to review a large series and see how the whole thing fits together, I did not find pages that made it usable (I am avoiding to say "I found it unusable", as that impression may be purely from that I couldn't find a more suitable pages that showed the same information in more usable form, i.e. user inexperience).

Speaking of the "whole picture", I am hesitant to see us pushed into the "here is a central system (or here are federated systems) to handle only the patch reviews" direction; our changes result after discussing unrelated features, wishes, or bugs that happen outside of any specific patches with enough frequency, and that is why I prefer "everything in one place" aspect of the development based on the mailing list. That is not to say that the "one place" has forever to be the mailing list, though. But the tooling around an e-mail based workflow (e.g. marking threads as "worth revisiting" for later inspection, saving chosen messages into a mailbox and running "git am" on it) is already something I am used to. Whatever system we might end up migrating to, the convenience it offers has to beat the convenience of existing workflow to be worth switching to, at least to me as a reviewer/contributor.

As the maintainer, I am not worried too much. As long as the mechanism can (1) reach "here is a series that is accepted by reviewers whose opinions are trusted" efficiently, and (2) allow me to queue the result without mistakes, I can go along with anything reasonable.