Attention is currently required from: Martin L Roth, Thomas Heijligen, Angel Pons, Anastasia Klimchuk. Felix Singer has posted comments on this change. ( https://review.coreboot.org/c/flashrom/+/63671 )
Change subject: Close GitHub PRs and issues automatically ......................................................................
Patch Set 3:
(1 comment)
Patchset:
PS3:
It looks like it might be able to install a github plugin that automatically sends PRs to gerrit ins […]
My reply became much bigger as I intended it to be, but I think it's a good analysis at least :)
To be honest, I don't see a reason why we should put more effort into this. Sure, it would be great if we also could cover GitHub PRs, but why don't people just use Gerrit? In my opinion it's a mix of some people who don't know better and some people who are just too lazy to deal with something else. Using a plugin, that integrates GitHub into Gerrit, feels more like a ugly workaround or hack for me.
So I think for some people the GitHub repository looks like as we would maintain it (when I search for "flashrom" then it's also the second hit on Google for me). It gets new commits and it also contains lots of issues and PRs, which make it look like very active. So some people might create a PR there, because they are not aware of Gerrit and they might think that the GitHub repository is the point for contact (reaching out for issues, sending patches). Thus, we have to reduce the amount of open issues and PRs. This GitHub Action hook is meant as a first step. The remaining issues and PRs will be closed by time. I will look over them and see what's useful.
Creating yet another account somewhere could also be a reason, but we allow using different authentication providers, including GitHub. So this is not a problem here. Though, it could be that people don't know that, but that's a different problem then.
In both cases, we would have to think of how to improve our documentation and how we can make them aware of Gerrit or the different authentication providers. An automated message, as it is done with this GitHub Action hook, is a very simple and cheap solution. We don't even have to set up something ourselves. The people, who are really interested in contributing, will look at our guidelines and push their patch to Gerrit.
And also, there might be people who are just too lazy to deal with something else, as demonstrated in this PR [1], and they refused using Gerrit because "git send-mail is simple enough". Their reasoning is pretty poor and I am not able to get anything out of it. However, sending patches over mail is absolutely fine for me. Another person said they don't want to use Gerrit because it is developed by Google. That's nothing I can work with. We shouldn't create workarounds for these people.
So I think we shouldn't put any more effort into this and we shouldn't support this because there is no actual reason. If anything, then we should improve our documentation, but adding a 3rd party plugin is just too much here. Not speaking of the potential issues the plugin might cause, e.g. new Gerrit version is out and we can't do the update because the plugin doesn't support it yet or the plugin breaks for some other reason.
[1] https://github.com/flashrom/flashrom/pull/154