Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Packages up for grabs

[Kent Fredric]

On Sat, 6 Aug 2016 19:28:19 +0000
Peter Stuge <peter@×××××.se> wrote:

> Michał Górny wrote:
> > Or file a pull request @ https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pulls.
> > That's the most convenient solution for most of proxy-maint team
> > members.
>
> How can I help improve that problematic situation?
>
> It's not cool to gravitate the project towards GitHub Inc.

I kinda think this missed the point.  ( Though I did entirely expect a
complaint when he suggested it )

One avenue for contribution without Github: Patches by bugzilla, was
stated.

That will work, and is not restricting anyones freedom. It may however,
restrict convenience. But not freedom.

As far as I'm concerned, the statement about Github was a "oh, yeah,
and if you want, Github works too, so if you find that more convenient,
so do we, go right ahead, but you ain't gotta".

Everyone is free to, and encouraged to, create better solutions.

But there's no force to use Github.

If Github dies tomorrow, Gentoo will not drop dead. The convenience
will be lost, but people will still be completely able to send queues
of patches via bugzilla, or email, in the event that web browsers all
spontaneously die and cease to be free by some dark voodoo magic.

`git format-patch` is after all optimised for that latter case somewhat.

Maybe we should look into an Email Based submission service, create a
gentoo mailing list exclusively for 3rd party (proxy-maint) mail patch
queues, optimised for receiving and vetting patch sequences.

You don't need some fancy Java wank for that.

Then all we'd need is some alternative implementation of
dev-perl/Gentoo-App-Pram that can read a local mbox, and select
emails/email threads containing patch series, apply them, push them,
and then auto-reply to the email with a confirmation.

And then people could continue to use Github for their
easy-fast-non-free-workflow, and they could use some email submission
thing for the slightly-less-easy-but-free-as-hell workflow.

And for extra fun, we could support non-patch-queue emails that
contained references to public arbitrary git repositories and
automatically configured itself to pick a patch series from it, like
this example [1]: 

1: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/linux.kernel/w957vpu3PPU

I mean, What do the Linux Kernel use? It would be a shame if they were
happening to use the email based workflow like I suggested([2,3,4]), and
if only there was a Gentoo Staffer who knew how Linux Contributions
worked and had documented it (sarcasm: [5])

2: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/linux.kernel/w957vpu3PPU
3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3960876
4: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-5663780
5:
https://github.com/gregkh/kernel-tutorial/blob/master/walkthrough#L47-L52