Hi, On Tue, 14 Jul 2020 at 14:06, Karsten Merker <mer...@debian.org> wrote: > > On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 06:05:42PM -0400, Corey Clayton wrote: > > On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 12:25:42PM -0600, Simon Glass wrote: > > > > > At present U-Boot uses the mailing list for patch review. What do > > > people think about trying out geritt or github for this? I'd be > > > willing to do a trial with the -dm mailing list. > > > > This is both my first message to the mailing list and my first > > email sent using mutt. I'm hoping to eventually participate > > with patches and reviews but the mailing-list-driven > > developement model has been a barrier for myself an probably > > many others. I'm slowly trying to climb over it now but some > > will never find the time. Perhaps a good question is: How long > > does it take to learn the mailing-list workflow vs the github > > workflow? > > > > If u-boot was using github, I would have contributed long ago > > and I suspect there are others in the same bucket. Thats my > > perspective at least :) > > Hello, > > to provide a different perspective: if U-Boot would have done > everything inside github instead of using its traditional > mailinglist-based workflow, I would never have contributed to > U-Boot, and moving everything from the mailinglist to github > would make any future contributions infeasible for me. > > The github workflow makes it impossible to open an issue or to > comment on an existing issue or to provide feedback about a patch > without being a github customer, and becoming a github customer > is not an option for me (and quite a number of other open-source > developers) as the github TOS contain clauses that I (and other > people) consider completely unacceptable. > > Besides the aforementioned points I am generally concerned about > the closed nature of the github issue- and pull-request system. > While it is of course easily possible to move a git repo from > github to somewhere else, it is as far as I know (please correct > me if I should me misinformed here) not possible to export the > comments and discussions in issues and pull requests in any > meaningful way to some other hosting platform, which creates a > strong vendor-lock-in once a project starts using the github > issue and pull-request facilities. With the traditional > mailinglist-based workflow on the other hand, moving everything > to another hosting platform is trivial, so vendor-lock-in > is not a problem there. > > Another problem that I see in the github workflow is that it > requires being online all the time while the mailinglist-based > workflow makes it easy to read and comment on patches while being > offline. I am sure that many people will now think "everybody is > online all day nowadays", but that's not true everywhere. I for > example travel a lot by train and use the time on the train for > catching up with current developments and for reviewing things. > Where I live, for most practical purposes being on the train > effectively means being offline as far as modern web applications > are concerned. Availability of mobile internet access is spotty > at best, and if one has internet connectivity inside the train at > all, it is often so slow that using it for interactive work on a > web interface is not feasible. Receiving, writing and sending > emails on the other hand works without problems even with spotty > and slow internet connectivity.
Just to clarify, my question was whether we should add a new workflow. I don't think there is any interest in removing the mailing-list flow. Re your comments about the TOS - what specifically causes problems? Re exporting comment I have been wondering that...is there no API for it? Finally, do your comments apply to gerrit and gitlab as well? Regards, Simon
