Why are we using email patch review instead of GitLab merge requests?

[Nicolas Dufresne]

Le jeudi 01 août 2024 à 14:37 +0100, Kieran Bingham a écrit :
> Quoting Nicolas Dufresne (2024-07-31 19:41:02)
> > 
> > Le mardi 30 juillet 2024 à 10:11 +0200, Milan Zamazal a écrit :
> > > Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart at ideasonboard.com> writes:
> > > 
> > > > For what it's worth, we would like to setup a public-inbox instance for
> > > > libcamera, to enable usage of tools such as b4 and lei.
> > > 
> > > One thing I miss here is to know whether a patch (or series) is merged
> > > or not.  I can obviously search in the repo but a notification attached
> > > to the review thread or something similar would better fit the workflow.
> > > Any idea?
> > 
> > This is obviously supposed to happen, your reviewer should go back and say that
> > this has been merged (literally every time), but the email workflow depends on
> 
> 'obviously supposed to happen' ... but I intentionally don't because
> it's extra mails (noise?) on the list.
> 
> I can start doing so if it's preferred, or maybe we can hook in
> patchwork to start mailing the list?

I would argue this should not be a reply to the "list" but to the submitter
here. That's what gitlab would do at least (though people can opt in some email
notification for the entire project in their configuration for gitlab MR).

Another way is to use gitlab commit notificaiton(which usually bundled by push).
Didn't think about it before, but for me that would be a pretty decent way to
keep track of what got merged (including stuff I might have reviewed a while
ago).

> 
> Though yes - I absolutely dislike that I have also on occasion reviewed
> patches that are already merged.
> 
> > human consistency. I notice this issue in Linux Media submsystem too. The
> > patchwork utility is probably meant to fix that, but a bit like bugzilla, this
> > tool seems slightly stuck in the past. It also (from an external obvserver)
> > tends to be out-of-sync with and require human intervention to say up-to-date.
> 
> Patchwork helps a little on this - as I get tags from patchwork in my
> mail client showing the state - but of course it's not foolproof as
> patchwork doesn't always get updated. Indeed there's definitely manual
> processing required to keep patchwork up to date.
> 
> --
> Kieran