Subject: Re: RFC: Moving git-gui development to GitHub

From: Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2019 20:25:40 +0200

Elijah Newren <[email-masked]> writes:
> On Thu, Oct 24, 2019 at 2:45 AM Pratyush Yadav <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>
>> I recently had some discussions with Dscho about whether it is a better
>> idea to use GitHub for development instead of email [0]. His argument
>> was that GitHub makes it easier for newcomers to contribute, since more
>> people are familiar with GitHub compared to mailing lists. Also, it is
>> somewhat difficult to set up an email-based workflow.
[...]
> GitHub is great for ease of creating new repos, learning about other
> developers, finding similar projects, creation of webhooks, etc.  But
> it's *awful* for code review.  Gerrit is a lot better at code reviews
> (though still has problems); so maybe dealing with both GitHub and
> Gerrit would be reasonable.
[...]
> Email is a horrible medium for sending/receiving
> changes, but at least it gets the overall code review model right
> (commit-messages-are-first-order-objects-that-can-be-reviewed,
> review-individual-commits, merge-per-topic, cover-letter included,
> range-diff for high-level comparison of different iterations,
> reversing-commit-order-display-based-on-author-timestamps-is-NOT-forgivable,
> Change-IDs-are-ugly, magic-refs-are-disgusting, etc.), something no
> GUI tool (yet) does to my knowledge.

I agree with that.  You need then to decide whether it is better to have
it easier for beginners to contribute, or is it better to have it easier
to review code.  What are the pain points?

Another source worth looking into is "Patches carved into stone tablets,
why the Linux kernel developers rely on plain text email instead of
using “modern” development tools." presentation by Greg KH from
2016[1][2].  But remember that git-gui is not Linux kernel; what works
for one might not work for the other.

It is unfortunate that we have no tools described in "Patches carved
into developer sigchains"[3] wishfull blog post by Konstantin Ryabitsev...

[1]: https://kernel-recipes.org/en/2016/talks/patches-carved-into-stone-tablets/
[2]: https://www.slideshare.net/ennael/kernel-recipes-2016-patches-carved-into-stone-tablets
[3]: https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/patches-carved-into-developer-sigchains

Regards,
--
Jakub Narębski