Re: On pull request workflows for the GNU toolchain

Jonathan Wakely via Gdb
2024-09-23T13:24:27Z

On Mon, 23 Sept 2024 at 13:09, Thomas Koenig via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
>
> [For the fortran people: Discussion on gcc@]
>
> Just a general remark.
>
> There are people, such as myself, who regularly mess up
> their git repositories because they have no mental model
> of what git is doing

I highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ffBJ4sVUb4 which
gives an excellent mental model for the basics (and everything else
follows from those basic rules).

> (case in point: The Fortran unsigned
> branch, which I managed to put into an unrepairable state
> despite considerable help from people who tried to help me
> fix it). This is especially true of volunteer maintainers,
> who are still the mainstay of gfortran.
>
> Whatever you end up doing, consider such maintainers, and
> if they still can contribute or would simply give up.
> If what you end up doing is too complicated, it may end up
> severely impacting the gfortran project (and possibly others).

We already use Git in all the toolchain projects and there's no
suggestion to change that.

The discussion is about how we do patch submission and patch review.
The GitHub pull request workflow is widely seen as simpler than our
current email-based workflow (not everybody agrees, of course). The
idea is to *lower* the barrier of entry for contributors, not raise
it.