On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 1:17 PM, Tom Rini <tr...@ti.com> wrote:
On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 12:59:05PM -0800, Vadim Bendebury (????) wrote:
On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 11:54 AM, Tom Rini <tr...@ti.com> wrote:
On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 11:46:35AM -0800, Vadim Bendebury (????)
wrote:
Hello Wolfgang,
[snip]
Can you not pick up the patches directly from the mailing list? I
mean, we know of the problems patchwork has (like silently dropping
certain base64 / utf8 encoded messages), so we should rather try and
get a more reliable feed for the patches?
this is the thing: picking up patches from patchwork is not something
you'd do regularly - this is just my way of populating the review
site
from a single test account.
If this workflow were adopted, each user would push their patch to
the
gerrit server, creating a new review branch for that particular
patch.
In general, gerrit view of the branch matches the submitter's view of
the branch - if the submitter has several patches in one branch, they
will all be uploaded by gerrit to the same separate branch,
maintaining the relationship between the patches.
This is my biggest concern. On the one-off to infrequent contribution
side (and we do have some of that), I worry about the infrastucture
hurdle here.
Sorry, I am not sure i understand what the biggest concern is: that
the users would push their own patches? Why is this a problem - the
patches would go into their own branches until reviewed and merged. Or
did you mean something else?
I mean, it's a higher hurdle to clear. Looking at other non-Android
projects, I know some folks have said "bah, not worth the effort" to
push trivial things, if it must come via gerrit. So some way to scrape
the ML for things that don't come in via gerrit to start with would be
handy.
I guess if the submitters are still expected to do both, ML and
gerrit, then yes, but the idea is that gerrit is the way to go,
mailing list is whatever gerrit generates. This way sending an email
to the mailing list or running 'git push' require pretty much similar
efforts
and BTW, I should have mentioned this earlier, there is a linux
command line based utility to manipulate patch states on the gerrit
server, I put its help output here: http://pastie.org/8481244
On the other side, what is the gerrit equivalent of 'git send-email
--compose ...', and I'm focusing on the compose side here. Or is it
just another mental switch the project makes, from that to push to
gerrit / compose email saying "hey, look at this"
This is how we usually do this:
- upload all patches to gerrit
- go to the web interface of the first patch in the series (by this
time gerrit would have a stack of patches showing their dependencies),
click on "review" - at this point gerrit would open a form to type the
cover message in
- once you finish composing the message you click on "publish
comments" and it gets sent to everybody who was picked as the
reviewer, and to default addresses, if any are configured (which of
course could be u-boot@lists.denx.de, for instance)
Right, and at that point we've mixed discussion of a concept with
discussion of a particular change, and we're in web-only for writes. I
guess (pending see below) one could just write the 0/N email separate,
or in-reply-to 1/N, so that the concept discussion stays on the list and
in the archives and so on.
Once thing I have to mention: gerrit is notorious for sending tons of
email, while this is being worked on, in the meantime some more
rigorous email filtering might be very useful.
Just how hard is it likely to be to filter things so that only:
1) new patches
2) reviews
get sent to the ML?
It is not hard, it's just a pain that it has to be done by every
recipient (as opposed to cutting the emails on the server). We are
working with gerrit community on that, but it goes quite slow.
Any one can upload patches to this server after creating an
account on
it. Any Google account will do, or if you don't want to have a
Google
based email you can create the account using your existing email.
Follow the prompts after clicking on 'Sign in' link on the top
right.
Is my understanding correct that I have to use or create a google
account in any case to participate in this type of work? What if
I am
not willing to accept Google's Terms of Service, or to register an
account with google for other reasons?
This is correct, if you decide to use the google infrastructure based
server. But you don't have to, gerrit is a stand alone application
which can be easily installed on the same server or on a different
server in the same location where the master u-boot git server is,
with you (denx.de) having full control over it.
Google hosting has advantages of providing extremely high bandwidth
and reliability, but google's version of gerrit (distributed and
replicated) is not a requirement, as i said, gerrit could be
hosted on
a linux machine.
Well, how much help and tweaking can we get, if we go with Google
hosting? My views are perhaps biased based on using gerrit earlier in
Android's life, but, I can't imagine us having the time to deal with
admining and upgrading a server later on.
Well, if you use google hosteg gerrit, you won't have a problem with
upgrading or managing the server. Some one would need to get admin
rights and set it up properly (create branches per custodian, set up
user groups and group permissions, etc.). I am not going to be able to
do this, but I sure could help pushing issues through the
Gerrit-On-Google folks, they are pretty accommodating and responsive.
Right, I'm saying the Google doing back-end management is a plus to
using Gerrit, and possibly a requirement of us using gerrit.
Self-hosted seems likely to be resource intensive.
Agreed. But using google services would involve creating google
accounts (even when using existing email addresses).
And of course, given ${insert
ones favorite now defunct google service} what might happen down the
line if the Google hosting goes away?
This is a very valid concern and there is no guarantees. But if push
comes to shove, gerrit is an open source product and it can be
installed on a stand alone server (which of course would be a pain).
And can data be extracted?
The merged patches are in their appropriate branches, presumably there
is a master git server somewhere which periodically syncs up with
gerrit server, and it is the trusted source.
The emails with comments would have been emailed at review time, lost
would be patches in flight and abandoned or modified patches from
earlier reviews, is this acceptable.
[snip]
This server is not configured yet, but in general gerrit allows for
three levels of reviewers - those who can just comment, those
who can
assign a +1 rating to the change (an equivalent of an acked by) and
those who can assign a +2 rating or push the change (the
custodians).
There is no point in setting these up on a mirror, but if so
desired,
it could be done.
How can we arrange to keep the mailing list in sync?
This is a big question for which there is no good answer. Gerrit will
send submitted patches in emails (limited to a configurable max patch
size), but it will not accept email based reviews. So, this would
involve a change in the way things done, I am just suggesting this as
an alternative for consideration.
Can we at least get all reviews sent to the ML?
The problem with this is that when reviews are sent to the mailing
list, they are for different custodians, trees, etc. It looks like
appx. half of them applies cleanly to the master branch, the rest do
not. Is there a way to tell what branch the patch is detined to by
looking at the email?
A much more robust approach is to have users push patches directly,
and set up branches/projects on the server, as required.
Right. But the biggest concern with this approach is that you limit
reviews to everyone who knows to be interested in $foo, rather than
everyone who is subscribed seeing (a hopefully useful subject in the)
patch that changes $foo, and deciding to take a peek. This is why it's
vital to have some way to keep the ML apprised of when new patches come
in.
But the gerrit server will be sending all patches out, one of the
destinations would be the group mailing list - is this not good
enough?
Pushing patches won't be hard to adapt to. Doing the reviews on a web
page might noe be too hard to adapt to (I don't like that "all unified"
spits out N tabs, rather than a single page with all unified diffs, but
I adapted to reading one source file changes at a time pretty quick).
What I usually do when I need to review a chain of related patches on
gerrit is go to the top patch in the chain, and then clock on the
'pull' tab in the download box. This generates a command line which,
if run locally, would bring the entire chain of patches to your git
repository. Than one can examine all patches together locally and
comment on gerrit.
But shifting to everyone must have notifiations and alerts or whatever
setup to find out about new changes they might care about, will suck.
again, the notifications with patch descriptions and diffs (to a
certain extent) would be sent to the list, this should be enough,
right?
--vb
--
Tom
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