[flashrom] Proposed changes to flashrom hosting and workflow

Stefan Tauner stefan.tauner at alumni.tuwien.ac.at
Thu Dec 31 19:18:36 CET 2015


(I am replying to various messages of the thread within this single
email. Hence the quotes below are of different people.)

> For those who missed it on IRC, Stefan (Reinauer) has proposed retiring SVN
> and patch work in favor of Git and (likely) Gerrit + Jenkins. Maintaining
> SVN and Patchwork represents a surprisingly large maintenance burden on top
> of Git and Gerrit that coreboot uses. Additionally, many in the community
> work around SVN's limitations by mirroring the project at places like
> Github anyway.

My counterproposal is to use gitub instead of Gerrit.
 - I really can't stand gerrit's interface.
 - We (relatively) often get patches from one-time contributors which
   is way easier on github because "everybody" has an account there and
   knows how to work with it (and if not it is straight forward
   compared to gerrit).
 - We don't really need jenkins. I am not a big fan of CI although I am
   a fan of build testing (hence flashrom is build tested for over 30
   architecture/OS combinations manually). Depending on how it would be
   to interface my build bot with jenkins it would however be an
   improvement (not sure if it is worth it though).
 - The only reason to avoid github for me would be due to its
   proprietary nature and related problems (lock-in etc).
   Please give me other reasons if you prefer coreboot.org-hosted
   gerrit over github.

> Though I know stefanct often makes small corrections/modifications to
> patches before submitting them (because our code review process makes even
> small amounts of back-and-forth comments so cumbersome). At least this way
> such changes can be tracked trivially on-line by diffing the N and N-1
> patch revisions in gerrit.

The reason is not because the back-and-forth is cumbersome but because
I am a perfectionist who does not want to bother others with my
annoying views of details and I don't expect anybody to care about these
changes like me (this does not always hold). The same goes for commit
messages. With Carl-Daniel I do exchange my views about these kind of
things *if* there is any exchange that is ;)

> If there really is a large demand for a non-svn hosting, I would be open
> to using mercurial (as master) because it at least has some sort of
> usability and can provide (conceptually limited) version numbers. I have
> worked for a few years with mercurial and the version numbers are
> extremely helpful even if they are per-branch and only semi-stable.

Just to make things clear here: I won't even discuss this option - it
is none. If you want to use another VCS management tool/interface then
you are free to do so, but you are the only person known to prefer
something else than git so you have to take on the burden and not force
everybody else to as it has been up to now - this has to and will end.

> The auto-tag of every commit sounds like an option I could agree with.
> It would preserve the convenience of the global strong svn commit ID
> even for git.
> However, I don't know if this would be acceptable for Stefan (especially
> from a merging perspective).

We have the infrastructure for using this kind of version strings since
about 2,5 years and there is a patch that would make flashrom use them
in prints which is lingering uncommented in the mailing list since
August 2013. It might not be exactly what we want eventually, but if
there are no comments I'll have to decide on something...

My current plan is to do a 0.9.9 release in January 2016 and switch to
git afterwards. I'd like to keep patchwork at least for a while and
figure out a way to keep the patches.
-- 
Kind regards/Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Stefan Tauner




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