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

[Nicolas Dufresne]

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
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.

> 
> > Another big issue that I mentioned is the difficulty to customize
> > workflows. I will also call editing review comments and code in the
> > git..b web UI "awful" unapologetically.
> > 
> > You mentioned working on more than a single project, I actually find the
> > mailing list workflow much better in that case. I get everything in a
> > single e-mail client, I don't have to log in github.com, gitlab.com,
> > gitlab.freedesktop.org and all the other ones independently. Until we
> > get some federation protocol for forges with decent clients that don't
> > run in web browsers, I'll have a hard time changing my mind.
> 
> At least for Emacs users, there are some add-ons that try to cope with
> that by using the Emacs UI, with varying levels of success.

Gitlab can be tooled with command line utilities, just like patchwork, lore and
other web utility have been tooled. As Quentin said, its the availability of the
tooling that holds back people on doing invasive transition.

The offline workflow is a good example, this is not impossible, but its also not
just matter to syncing your emails in your 30 years old mail client. That being
said, some folks have command line flow and make that happen around gitlab,
here's one example (I haven't tried, but it I should):

https://dev.to/profclems/take-gitlab-to-the-command-line-1ccl

Nicolas