Hi Vadim, Patrick,
On Thu, Oct 05, 2023 at 11:18:19AM -0700, Vadim Bendebury wrote:
I admittedly am very loosely familiar with the email based reveiw flow, my experience if from many years back, and I don't have fond memories of it :)
IMO sr.ht has innovated quite nicely here. Their ML manager (lists.sr.ht) detects patches and shows things like status APPLIED/PENDING/NACKed (based on git activity IIRC) and CI build status. Removing some of the legacy objections to the git email workflow.
(Side note: The APIs are all open and built to be modular so jenkins integration would likely not be hard)
Anyone can reply from the webinterface through their email client with a mailto:// link or The "Forward this thread to me" button, which hast to be the best ML invention since sliced bread eer I mean threads.
Notice: no account necessary. You just go ahead and do that thing you want to do.
You can prepare/send patchsets from the webinterface (with an account) to lower the entry barrier for not-yet git-email afficionados.
Until git(ea) PR federation through activitypub comes to fruition and is widely adopted I'm putting my decentralized eggs into the git-email basket.
That being said I'm not sure this particular tool is right for coreboot. I'm just saying in some aspects (barrier to contribute, community building) this is perhaps the gold standard now.
Just in case this is not known: in gerrit you can subscribe to receive emails about all patches sent to a git repo: you click on the cog in the top right, then on 'Notifications' on the next screen, and then you can configure what emails on what repositories you want to receive. Would this address your concern?
I didn't know that but IMO what gerrit sends out is absolutely not equivalent to a normal patch ML.
There's also the coreboot-gerrit mailing list (archive, although it doesn't thread emails properly, at https://mail.coreboot.org/hyperkitty/list/coreboot-gerrit@coreboot.org/lates...) that can be subscribed to.
We used to have these emails end up on the main mailing list (for familiarity after we moved from a mailing list + svn based flow to Gerrit
- git in 2011), but people complained that there's too much noise on the
list.
I mean, look at the emails gerrit sends they're almost pure spam, IMO that's another dimension of the problem with gerrit.
I'm overwhelemed enought by the gerrit emails I get from just my own patches. When humans send patches and humans send replies to those patches we don't get useless and unactionable mails like "attention is required by" and "comments were posted" without the actual comments. I might want to read those comments, Gerrit, grrrr!
I think this problem is multiplied because in gerrit everything is per-patch rather than per-series. I've never had this much of a problem with large series in gitlab even though it can be chatty too.
Something I've seen, but that may not work for coreboot is to keep gerrit for project members/teams working closeley together, but allow [PATCH] submission on the ML for outsiders.
idk. just a baseline for discussion.
--Daniel