Using gerrit or github for review?

[Simon Glass]

Hi,

On Tue, 14 Jul 2020 at 14:06, Karsten Merker <merker at debian.org> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 06:05:42PM -0400, Corey Clayton wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 12:25:42PM -0600, Simon Glass wrote:
> >
> > > At present U-Boot uses the mailing list for patch review. What do
> > > people think about trying out geritt or github for this? I'd be
> > > willing to do a trial with the -dm mailing list.
> >
> > This is both my first message to the mailing list and my first
> > email sent using mutt.  I'm hoping to eventually participate
> > with patches and reviews but the mailing-list-driven
> > developement model has been a barrier for myself an probably
> > many others.  I'm slowly trying to climb over it now but some
> > will never find the time.  Perhaps a good question is: How long
> > does it take to learn the mailing-list workflow vs the github
> > workflow?
> >
> > If u-boot was using github, I would have contributed long ago
> > and I suspect there are others in the same bucket.  Thats my
> > perspective at least :)
>
> Hello,
>
> to provide a different perspective: if U-Boot would have done
> everything inside github instead of using its traditional
> mailinglist-based workflow, I would never have contributed to
> U-Boot, and moving everything from the mailinglist to github
> would make any future contributions infeasible for me.
>
> The github workflow makes it impossible to open an issue or to
> comment on an existing issue or to provide feedback about a patch
> without being a github customer, and becoming a github customer
> is not an option for me (and quite a number of other open-source
> developers) as the github TOS contain clauses that I (and other
> people) consider completely unacceptable.
>
> Besides the aforementioned points I am generally concerned about
> the closed nature of the github issue- and pull-request system.
> While it is of course easily possible to move a git repo from
> github to somewhere else, it is as far as I know (please correct
> me if I should me misinformed here) not possible to export the
> comments and discussions in issues and pull requests in any
> meaningful way to some other hosting platform, which creates a
> strong vendor-lock-in once a project starts using the github
> issue and pull-request facilities.  With the traditional
> mailinglist-based workflow on the other hand, moving everything
> to another hosting platform is trivial, so vendor-lock-in
> is not a problem there.
>
> Another problem that I see in the github workflow is that it
> requires being online all the time while the mailinglist-based
> workflow makes it easy to read and comment on patches while being
> offline.  I am sure that many people will now think "everybody is
> online all day nowadays", but that's not true everywhere.  I for
> example travel a lot by train and use the time on the train for
> catching up with current developments and for reviewing things.
> Where I live, for most practical purposes being on the train
> effectively means being offline as far as modern web applications
> are concerned.  Availability of mobile internet access is spotty
> at best, and if one has internet connectivity inside the train at
> all, it is often so slow that using it for interactive work on a
> web interface is not feasible.  Receiving, writing and sending
> emails on the other hand works without problems even with spotty
> and slow internet connectivity.

Just to clarify, my question was whether we should add a new workflow.
I don't think there is any interest in removing the mailing-list flow.

Re your comments about the TOS - what specifically causes problems? Re
exporting comment I have been wondering that...is there no API for it?
Finally, do your comments apply to gerrit and gitlab as well?

Regards,
Simon