Re: Updated Sourceware infrastructure plans

Ben Boeckel via Gdb
2024-05-06T14:00:44Z

On Sun, May 05, 2024 at 08:22:12 +0300, Benson Muite wrote:
> On 04/05/2024 22.56, Ben Boeckel via Overseers wrote:
> > As a fellow FOSS maintainer I definitely appreciate the benefit of being
> > email-based (`mutt` is far better at wrangling notifications from
> > umpteen places than…well basically any website is at even their own),
> > but as a *contributor* it is utterly opaque. It's not always clear if my
> > patch has been seen, if it is waiting on maintainer time, or for me to
> > do something. After one review, what is the courtesy time before pushing
> > a new patchset to avoid a review "crossing in the night" as I push more
> > patches? Did I get everyone that commented on the patch the first time
> > in the Cc list properly? Is a discussion considered resolved (FWIW,
> > Github is annoying with its conversation resolution behavior IMO;
> > GitLab's explicit closing is much better). Has it been merged? To the
> > right place? And that's for patches I author; figuring out the status of
> > patches I'm interested in but not the author of is even harder. A forge
> > surfaces a lot of this information pretty well and, to me, GitLab at
> > least offers usable enough email messages (e.g., discussions on threads
> > will thread in email too) that the public tracking of such things is far
> > more useful on the whole.
>
> This is an area that also needs standardization of important
> functionality. Some method of archiving the content is also helpful -
> email does this well but typically does not offer dashboard. Sourcehut
> makes reading threads using the web interface very easy.

The other thing that email makes difficult to do: jump in on an existing
discussion without having been subscribed previously. I mean, I know
how to tell `mutt` to set an `In-Reply-To` header and munge a proper
reply by hand once I find a `Message-Id` (though a fully proper
`References` header is usually way too much work to be worth it), but
this is not something I expect others to be able to easily perform.

> Web interfaces are difficult to automate, but friendlier for occasional
> use and encouraging new contributions. Tools separate from the version
> control system such as Gerrit, Phabricator, Rhode Code and Review Board
> also enable discussion management and overview.

Note that forges tend to have very rich APIs. It's certainly not as easy
as clicking around manually for one-off tasks or setting up a shell
pipeline to process some emails, but building automation isn't
impossible.

--Ben