On Tue, Nov 04, 2025 at 08:01:29AM +0100, Ales Musil via discuss wrote: > The initial discussion was held during the OVN technical community meeting > - November 3rd [0]. The recent patchwork slowness that lasted for a couple > of months sparked a discussion if it's reasonable to switch to a different > patchwork instance or platform completely. The three options listed during > the discussion were following:
Hi Ales, i'll add some opinions below. > > 1) Keep using the current system. I guess that depends on the effort to make patchwork performant again. But it would probably be the least effort for most people. > > 2) Switch to Github pull request based approach. That would mean getting > off the mailing list completely. This has some advantages in regards to CI > as we wouldn't require to pull the patches from ML and submit them into a > separate repository to do the testing. Another positive thing might be > attracting more contributors. However, there are also downsides PRs usually > means series of commits being submitted together, that might be hard to > review. The conversations in PRs are hard to follow in something bigger. In contrast to Mailinglists Github and Gerrit have a very linear communication history. So you can basically only discuss on a line of code and not branch out afterwards from this discussion. I think this is valuable in order to keep on the point of the discussion as it is hard to branch out. However I think we use this branching feature quite often. It allows us to have discussions not only on a specific line of code, but branch out to have more general discussion of the patch or the whole approach or feature. I have the feeling that we would miss important discussion points if we do not have the possibility. In addition Github/Gerrit make it hard for you to comment on multiple locations and "reference" them together in some kind of way. If you as a reviewer want to point out a relation between two parts of a patch you would need to leave two comments on there that might be closed separately. I think that makes it more confusing than now. Also i think we would need a solution for larger Changes. Gerrit has some possibilities there, but I am not aware of any on Github. Just like we have now i think it is necessary to have one level where we have each individual commit for review, but also something that holds multiple commits together (like the current Patchsets). >From my experience with Github i think using a PR to replace a Patchset will not work ideal. PRs work well if you review the outcome of the whole PR (so all changes at once), but get not so easy to work with if you want to review each individual commit. In addition partial merges of a PR are not something that are possible as i know. I think for larger patchsets it is common to already merge valid changes and only continue the discussion on the rest of the patches. > > 3) Use a different patchwork instance. One of the suggested solutions might > be to move not only the patchwork instance, but also ML into > Linux Foundation. This should bring more stability and the overall process > would change from the outside perspective, the possible downside is that > this process would be slow spanning over weeks, maybe even months. Could you maybe elaborate what those changes would mean? It sounds to me like it would just mean new addresses for the mailinglist and patchwork. But i am probably missing something. > > 4) Use a Gerrit instance, during the meeting there wasn't a huge discussion > about gerrit and given our choices it might actually be more of an extra > unless someone has a really good reason why we would choose that. > > The list is not exhaustive, any other suggestions are very much welcome, > plus the opinion why certain options might be or not be a good idea. I > would also like to emphasize that this is an open ended question. This > thread should serve as a discussion continuation. Please let us know what > you think. Thanks a lot for the discussion, Felix > > [0] https://mail.openvswitch.org/pipermail/ovs-dev/2025-October/426687.html > > Best regards, > Ales > _______________________________________________ > discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://mail.openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/ovs-discuss _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/ovs-discuss
