On 25-May-20 7:44 PM, Morten Brørup wrote:
From: dev [mailto:dev-boun...@dpdk.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Monjalon
Sent: Monday, May 25, 2020 6:29 PM

25/05/2020 18:09, Burakov, Anatoly:
On 25-May-20 5:04 PM, Maxime Coquelin wrote:
On 5/25/20 5:59 PM, Burakov, Anatoly wrote:
On 25-May-20 4:52 PM, Maxime Coquelin wrote:
On 5/25/20 5:35 PM, Jerin Jacob wrote:
On May 25, 2020 Thomas Monjalon wrote:
My concern about clarity is the history of the discussion.
When we post a new versions in GitHub, it's very hard to keep
track
of the history.
As a maintainer, I need to see the history to understand what
happened,
what we are waiting for, and what should be merged.

IMO, The complete history is available per pull request URL.
I think, Github also email notification mechanism those to
prefer to see
comments in the email too.

In addition to that, Bugzilla, patchwork, CI stuff all
integrated into
one place.
I am quite impressed with vscode community collaboration.
https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/pulls

Out of curiosity, just checked the git history and I'm not that
impressed. For example last commit on the master branch:


https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/commit/2a4cecf3f2f72346d06990feeb74
46b3915d6148


Commit title: " Fix #98530 "
Commit message empty, no explanation on what the patch is doing.

Then, let's check the the issue it is pointed to:
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/98530

Issue is created 15 minutes before the patch is being merged. All
that
done by the same contributor, without any review.


Just because they do it wrong doesn't mean we can't do it right :)
This
says more about Microsoft's lack of process around VSCode than it
does
about Github the tool.


True. I was just pointing out that is not the kind of process I
would
personally want to adopt.


You won't find disagreement here, but this "process" is not due to
the
tool. You can just as well allow Thomas to merge stuff without any
review because he has commit rights, no Github needed - and you would
be
faced with the same problem.

So, i don't think Jerin was suggesting that we degrade our
merge/commit
rules. Rather, the point was that (whatever you think of VSCode's
review/merge process) there are a lot of pull requests and there is
healthy community collaboration. I'm not saying we don't have that,

Yes, recent survey said the process was fine:
        http://mails.dpdk.org/archives/announce/2019-June/000268.html


obviously, but i have a suspicion that we'll get more of it if we
lower
the barrier for entry (not the barrier for merge!). I think there is
a
way to lower the secondary skill level needed to contribute to DPDK
without lowering coding/merge standards with it.

That is exactly what I am asking for: Lowering the barrier and increasing the 
feeling of success for newcomers. (The barrier for merge is probably fine; I'll 
leave that discussion to the maintainers.)


About the barrier for entry, maybe it is not obvious because I don't
communicate a lot about it, but please be aware that I (and other
maintainers I think) are doing a lot of changes in newcomer patches
to avoid asking them knowing the whole process from the beginning.
Then frequent contributors get educated on the way.

Great! I wish that every developer would think and behave this way.

Part of the problem is, there are two different maintainers here: maintainers like myself, who maintain a certain area of the code, and maintainers like Thomas, who has *commit rights* and maintains the entire tree.

And therein lies the problem: Thomas (David, etc.) doesn't look at every area of the code, he relies on us to do it. However, *he* is doing the committing, and fixing up patches, etc. - so, i can't really say things like, "hey, your indentation's wrong here, but Thomas will fix it on apply" because that's me pushing more work onto Thomas, something i don't think i have the moral right to do :)

So, while Thomas is free to "fix on apply" at his own desire, i don't think we have to make this a habit.



I think the only real barrier we have is to sign the patch
with a real name and send an email to right list.
The ask for SoB real name is probably what started this thread
in Morten's mind. And the SoB requirement will *never* change.

The incorrect Signed-off-by might be the only hard barrier (which we cannot 
avoid). But that did not trigger me.

I was raising the discussion to bring attention to soft barriers for 
contributors. What triggered me was the request to split the patch into 
multiple patches; a kind of feedback I have seen before. For an experienced git 
user, this is probably very easy, but for a git newbie (like myself), it 
basically means starting all over and trying to figure out the right set of git 
commands to do this, which can be perceived as a difficult task requiring a lot 
of effort.

Perhaps we could supplement the Contributor Guidelines with a set of cookbooks 
for different steps in the contribution process, so reviewers can be refer 
newcomers to the relevant of these as part of the feedback. Just like any 
professional customer support team has a set of canned answers ready for common 
customer issues. (Please note: I am not suggesting adding an AI/ML chat bot 
reviewer to the mailing list!)

That's a great idea, although it's arguably slightly out of scope for DPDK. Then again, we do have a "fixline" instructions, so why not have a "git reset HEAD^ && git add -p" in there while we're at it :)


The amount of Contributor Guideline documentation is also a balance... it must 
be long enough to contain the relevant information to get going, but short 
enough for newcomers to bother reading it.



--
Thanks,
Anatoly

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