Hi Christopher,
Christopher Baines <m...@cbaines.net> writes:
[[PGP Signed Part:Undecided]]
Sergio Pastor Pérez <sergio.pastorpe...@outlook.es> writes:
I cannot help you since I don't have commit access. But I want
to thank
you for your hard work, I'm currently using your package.
I can only echo your frustration since I also have some patches
ready to
be merged that seem to be forgotten. As it has been discussed
in the
past, Guix is growing, but there are not enough hands to merge
all the
contributions that come through.
We should try to come up with a solution that alleviates the
burden on
the maintainers. Given how often this issue arises, what if we
try, as
a collective, to suggest new mechanisms that would improve the
situation?
If I recall correctly, someone suggested having a development
branch in
which, once the QA passes, the patches get automatically
merged. I know
some people rose concerns about the slowness of the QA system
for this
to be an effective solution, and there is also the issue
ordering the
patch application.
If the previous solution is ruled out, I would like to know the
opinion
of the Guix community on a voting system. I'm imagining a
system where
we reuse the mailing infrastructure we have, where each
accepted mail in
the guix devel mailing list has 1 vote for a given patch, that
way we
avoid multiple votes from the same entity and would allow
people without
commit access, but active on the Guix development, to
participate. So,
we could set up a threshold where if a patch gets 10 votes from
non-committers the merge would be done; preferably automated,
but if it's
not possible, committers would know what is ready to be merged
without
effort and what the community wants.
We've had for many months a feature in QA [1] where people can
mark
patches as being reviewed and looking like they're ready to be
merged,
which is personally what I hope will mitigate this feeling of "I
cannot
help you since I don't have commit access", because you can
help, you
can review the patches and if you think they're ready to merge,
you can
record that, and this does help highlight patches that are ready
to
merge.
Yes, I’ve used it before. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be
making a material difference, as the size of the backlog continues
to grow[1]. Progress on this problem would result in the backlog
decreasing. It doesn’t matter how many reviewers say it looks
good -- a committer is required to actually push the changes.
The macro problem of the review process being broken has existed
for years and there doesn’t seem to be concensus on the cause,
much less a solution. Waiting for that fix is unreasonable, but
if a committer was willing to collaborate with me, the worst
effects could be mitigated. This is similar to how the Linux
kernel works -- the "trusted deputy" approach. It’d also provide
a path for contributers to grow into committers. Guix seems
committed to using an email-based workflow, so I think it makes a
lot of sense to look at how Linux does it. It’s the most
successful project in the world to use email-based development.
Thanks,
— Ian
[1]: https://debbugs.gnu.org/rrd/guix-patches.html
