Using gerrit or github for review?

[Pratyush Yadav]

Hi,

I'm a bit late to this discussion, but I'll drop my $0.02 anyway.

On 13/07/20 02:06PM, Simon Glass wrote:
> Hi Heinrich,
> 
> On Mon, 13 Jul 2020 at 13:36, Heinrich Schuchardt <xypron.glpk at gmx.de> wrote:
> >
> > On 13.07.20 20:25, Simon Glass wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > At present U-Boot uses the mailing list for patch review. What do
> >
> > Currently we are using Patchwork to keep track of the review process:
> >
> > https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/uboot/list/
> >
> > > people think about trying out geritt or github for this? I'd be
> > > willing to do a trial with the -dm mailing list.
> > >
> > > My idea is that patman would email out the patches and also upload
> > > them to one of these systems. With geritt, emails are sent every time
> > > there is a review, but for github I'm not sure.
> >
> > Do we need an new tool? Managing reviews it supported by Gitlab.
> >
> > There is no need for patman in a process with any of the mentioned
> > tools. Gitlab, Gerrit, and Github send out mails to reviewers.
> >
> > The work flow with Gitlab and Gerrit that I have seen relied on a role
> > concept where only specific users of the system are reviewers. - Our
> > current process allows anybody to review. This is what I would like to keep.
> >
> > Simon, could you, please, explain why you want to change the current
> > process.
> 
> I have used various tools and I'm wondering whether having another
> option might have some benefits in terms of productivity, automation
> and accessibility. Just as one example, if people pushed patches to
> github / gitlab then we could 1) check out the branch and try it, 2)
> have test automation attached, 3) use a UI for review.
> 
> So that is the purpose of my email.

You might want to look into GitGitGadget (GGG in short) [0][1]. GGG lets 
you open GitHub Pull Requests and it will convert them to patch form and 
send them to the Git mailing list. It works pretty well for the most 
part (though I haven't ever used personally. Just observed other people 
using it a lot). It automatically adds version number to patches, and 
even CCs the subsystem maintainers automatically (as of now there are 
only two, but it shouldn't be difficult to extend it to use 
get_maintainer.pl). It also watches for replies on the email thread and 
shows them in comments to the Pull Request. It also runs CI build and 
tests for each PR.

One major limitation of the tool is that while you can read replies to 
the email thread, you can't send replies. You'd still need a plain text 
email client to do that. I attempted to solve this problem once but I 
didn't make much progress partly due to lack of time and partly due lack 
of TypeScript and Azure experience. But I think it can be done.

I think it can help bridge the gap between the mailing list workflow and 
the GitHub workflow. If anyone is interested, they can try porting it to 
work with the U-Boot mailing list.

[0] https://github.com/gitgitgadget/gitgitgadget
[1] https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git

-- 
Regards,
Pratyush Yadav
Texas Instruments India