Hello, everyone.

The current workflow for handling github pull requests is at least
suboptimal. Handling pull requests takes a fair effort from the few
developers contributing there, and the progress is often stalled by
package maintainers which are either unresponsive or not registered on
github at all. That's why I'd like to get your ideas on how we could
improve the workflow.



Current workflow
================

Let's summarize the current workflow first. Right now, there's a few
Gentoo developers who actively monitor pull requests on gentoo/gentoo
repository. Those developers review incoming pull requests and help
submitters get their contributions in shape. Some of those developers
also try to 'CC' (@-mention) package maintainers to get their attention
on the pull request.

Sadly, @-mentioning sucks for a few reasons:

1. Many of the Gentoo developers have different nicknames on GitHub.
Some developers don't even set their real names which makes them even
harder to find.

2. Teams can be created only by repository 'owners' (which pretty much
is equivalent of Infra). Which practically means I'm the only person
migrating teams (projects, herds) to GitHub.

3. GitHub notifications are not very reliable. Some developers get only
some of them via mail, some don't. And some simply don't care.

4. Some developers openly refuse to work with contributors via GitHub.
Proxying them manually is not really productive.



Potential solution: bi-dir github <=> bugzilla integration
==========================================================

My current idea would be pretty much that:

1. a new dedicated Gentoo bug would be automatically created for every
pull request on github,

2. all comments from github would be automatically copied to bugzie.
All bugzie comments would be automatically copied to github,

3. resolving the bug would automatically close the relevant pull
request.

This way, all pull requests can be assigned to package maintainers in
Bugzilla without having to resort to GitHub user or team names. All
involved parties would get more reliable Bugzilla notification mails.
They could choose to either use the provided URLs to discuss the pull
request on GitHub, or discuss it directly on Bugzilla, whichever is
more convenient to them.

The additional Bugzilla load should be manageable, though we may want
to employ some kind of rate limiting in case someone though it'd funny
to spam our bugzilla via spamming github.

Problems:

- handling line comments (probably a Bugzie comment with quoted code
  snippet),

- handling comment edits and removals,

- some people will get double mail for each comment,

- extra bugs for existing issues (we shouldn't really try to reuse
  existing bugs for this).



What are your thoughts? Any other proposals?


-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny
<http://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/>

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