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

[Nicolas Dufresne]

Hi Laurent,

Le dimanche 28 juillet 2024 à 18:54 +0300, Laurent Pinchart a écrit :
> On Sun, Jul 28, 2024 at 03:17:18PM +0000, Barnabás Pőcze wrote:
> > 2024. július 28., vasárnap 17:07 keltezéssel, Neal Gompa írta:
> > 
> > > Hey folks,
> > > 
> > > I just found out today that libcamera exists on FDO GitLab[1], so I'm
> > > wondering why we aren't just using merge requests over there instead?
> > > Among other things, it makes it much easier for people to track what's
> > > going on with proposed changes, simplifies the process for new
> > > contributors, enables immediate feedback on the viability of
> > > contributions, and allows the mailing list discussions to be more
> > > focused on higher level things.
> > > 
> > > [1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/camera/libcamera
> > 
> > I have already asked about this. As far as I recall the TLDR is that the people
> > in charge like the mailing list + patchwork + bugzilla + etc. workflow better,
> > and GitLab is only used for CI.
> 
> The main issue with gitlab is the awful patch review and discussion UI,
> couple with the fact that it's quite difficult to customize workflows
> given the limited number of available tools compared to mailing list
> workflows.

Your answer seems completely based on personal taste (I'm fine with opinions,
don't read me wrong). Perhaps it could be nice to rephrase to make it clear its
a choice rather then bashing other flows. 'Awful' is your personal opinion (also
impression if you have never submitted MR to other projects). As an example, I
tend to describe the email flow the exact same way (or just 'painful'), but I'm
very cautious when saying that out-loud on ML, since this is clearly a personal
taste and I don't pretend others must agree.

For me, MR let me silently start watching a specific changes, and notify me only
for what I've explicitly asked for. With the current email, I'd have to send an
email to everyone asking to "CC me please", or having to watch for all the
unrelated notifications. On Linux there is tools to change this, with filters
and stuff, but its specific to Linux mailing list server, and not as easy and
intuitive. If you are working on more then a single project (like a dozen) this
is a big deal. As a side effect, it can takes several days for me to find the
time to parse through the list and give a simple Ack.

Gitlab specifically clearly lack a feature to comment against the commit
message, and this I'll keep pushing to gitlab project, but that imho is not
enough for me to consider it 'Awful'. I've got used to copy the messages as a
comment, and then review it inline, its a small overhead.

> 
> Merge requests themselves are fine I think. I have it somewhere on a
> TODO list to experiment with bridging them to e-mail. That would be a
> one-way bridge though, a merge request would be translated to a set of
> patches sent to the mailing list, and reviewed there. I'm not sure when
> I could find time to work on this.
> 

At least this would trigger CI before we even code review, which as a in-
frequent contributor I appreciate, cause with low practice I tend to do more
mistakes. As CI gets bigger, it also gets more difficult to run everything
locally.

Nicolas