Re: improving our contributing tools and workflow

[David Kastrup]

Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> writes:

> Janek Warchoł writes:
>
>> Other things that are worth looking at are:
>> - gitorious
>> - gerrit
>> - something else i've forgotten?
>
> You may want to study
>
> - plain email-based patch submission using a benevolent dictator,
>   ie, use git the way it was designed and is still used by the
>   creators (linux, git).

git's development itself is less dictator-specific than Linux'
development, I think.  This is also a bit of a red herring since our
Contributor's Guide does _not_ ask for using the issue tracker (in fact,
the issue tracker itself quite clearly states that users should not
enter issues themselves).  It can be argued that Email-based patch
submission _is_ already what we propose, and we have the bug-squad as an
interface into the issue tracking system from there.

Part of the reason is actually that I started contributing patches a few
years ago to LilyPond when there was nothing like the bug squad around,
and after a while of contributions seemingly going down the drain
without anybody who could be interested in them, getting really and
quite obnoxiously pissed.

So Graham organized the infrastructure where this would not easily
happen again in the same manner, and the Contributor's Guide reflects
it.

But we haven't exactly seen a flurry of patches from newcomers appearing
on the lists.  Of course, part of the reason is that any good mailing
list citizen will, before contributing, study some of the mailing list
archives to figure out how things are usually done.

And of course, studying our mailing list histories does not suggest that
"just submit a git patch series" is a viable thing to do.  So should our
finally selected issue/review tool try _faking_ that appearance?

Maybe.  No idea.  Perhaps we are overthinking this.  At any rate,
looking at options for more Git-centric tools than Rietveld can't do
much harm.

-- 
David Kastrup