[OE-core] Why openembedded-core mailing list is now author of some patches?

[richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org]

On Sun, 2019-03-24 at 01:41 -0400, Neal Gompa wrote:
> Has anyone considered the (perhaps radical?) idea that the sending
> changes as an email patch series should be replaced? For example, if
> git.openembedded.org and git.yoctoproject.org were overlaid with
> Pagure[0] frontends (it uses Gitolite internally, so you can have
> multiple frontends in place for the same Git repos), it would be easy
> enough to support pull requests, even from external Git servers. And
> with that model, OE/Yocto can use CI properly (e.g. using Jenkins,
> Zuul, or something else) rather than building more hacks on top of
> emails.

Using alternatives does get discussed periodically.

It depends which problem(s) we're trying to solve really. I don't
believe that pagure/github/gitlab/etc would solve a CI problem since
our real CI challenge is we can't run our test matrix in a time frame
which allows testing of every patch.

If you mean patchtest/patchwork testing, that is a small subset of CI
and has to be carefully designed as its effectively remote code
injection. I appreciate the likes of travis also have ways of
mitigating potential issues there, there are a lot of ways it could be
done, patchtest was the way some people had time to make it work.

I'd note that pagure also has an issue tracking system so it isn't just
a front end to gitolite, its also looking to replace bugzilla.

I actually think our main issue is people with time to help work on
things. If you're saying that switching to pagure will mean we then
have number of new developers with time to help us on the project then
we should seriously consider it. I'm not convinced that is the main
barrier there to that, or that would be the outcome. I do agree it may
be a barrier to occasional submitters unfortunately though.

Also, keep in mind these pull models work well for cases where you have
a small number of reviewers. The mailing list model works better where
you have a wider team looking at review. I suspect if we switched to
something which didn't have a mail interface, we'd probably lose much
of the review we currently get and mean that we'd rely on a small
number of peope for all the review.

Obviously this is all my personal opinion and I'm very mindful of that,
I don't want to be seen to be shutting down ideas and impacting
innovation. We do also need to be mindful of what we have where it is
working too though.

Cheers,

Richard