Re: Updated Sourceware infrastructure plans

Claudio Bantaloukas via Gdb
2024-05-02T12:59:31Z

On 5/1/2024 10:26 PM, Mark Wielaard wrote:
> Hi Jason,
>
> On Wed, May 01, 2024 at 04:04:37PM -0400, Jason Merrill wrote:
>> On 5/1/24 12:15, Jeff Law wrote:
>>> We're currently using patchwork to track patches tagged with
>>> RISC-V.ï¿½ We don't do much review with patchwork.ï¿½ In that model
>>> patchwork ultimately just adds overhead as I'm constantly trying
>>> to figure out what patches have been integrated vs what are still
>>> outstanding.
>>>
>>> Patchwork definitely isn't the answer IMHO.ï¿½ Nor is gitlab MRs
>>> which we use heavily internally.ï¿½ But boy I want to get away from
>>> email and to a pull request kind of flow.
>>
>> Do you (or others) have any thoughts about GitLab FOSS?
>
> The gitlab "community edition" still feels not very much "community".
> We could run our own instance, but it will still be "open core" with
> features missing to try to draw you towards the proprietary hosted
> saas version. Also it seems to have way too much overhead. The focus
> is clearly corporate developers where managers want assurances the
> mandatory "pipelines" are executed and "workflows" followed exactly.

Hi Mark,

I'm clearly in the "corporate developers" category here, and can testify
that managers don't care about "pipelines and workflows". They do care
that people's (very expensive) time be used sparingly.
The most expensive time is reviewer time so the reasoning behind running
CI pipelines or workflows before review is that it's not a good use of
people's time to review a patch which breaks tests.
The next most expensive time is that spent investigating breakages which
could have been avoided with automated testing.

It doesn't matter what the tool's name is: as long as one can see the
change (diffs), whether the change is likely to break stuff (that's CI)
and fellow hacker's comments in one place without having to trawl
through multiple systems or set up complex local machinery, that's a
recipe for faster reviews happening once a build is "green".
I think we can agree that's a good thing!

Github and GitLab are good from a corporate standpoint and they do the
"all the info I need in one place" thing well, but are not exactly Libre.

Has anyone considered https://forgejo.org/ ?
It's a Libre fork of Gitea. Has functionality similar to github but is
Libre and openly advocating compatibility between forges.

Cheers,
--
Claudio Bantaloukas