Gentoo Archives: gentoo-project

From: "Anthony G. Basile" <blueness@g.o>
To: gentoo-project@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-project] Call for Agenda Items -- Council Meeting 2015-10-11
Date: Thu, 08 Oct 2015 12:58:26
Message-Id: 56166864.2050204@gentoo.org
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-project] Call for Agenda Items -- Council Meeting 2015-10-11 by Andrew Savchenko
1 On 10/8/15 8:42 AM, Andrew Savchenko wrote:
2 > Hello all,
3 >
4 > On Wed, 30 Sep 2015 20:45:10 +0200 Michał Górny wrote:
5 >> The second issue that may need Council's attention is developers'
6 >> attitude towards pull request source via GitHub.
7 >>
8 >> One and a half month since enabling it, we already had almost 150 pull
9 >> requests from Gentoo users (and a few Gentoo developers who use this as
10 >> a collaboration tool). Sadly, some developers not only refuse to use
11 >> GitHub (which is an acceptable choice) but also have very negative
12 >> attitude towards users submitting pull requests and the developers
13 >> helping with them.
14 >>
15 >> The point is, if we want users to submit pull requests, we should be
16 >> handling them. Then we can't really agree on some developer refusing to
17 >> look at the request, and requesting the user to re-send it some other,
18 >> less convenient way. Or another developer just silently ignoring every
19 >> request and rudely responding to pings.
20 >>
21 >> Since the amount of work necessary to proxy between users
22 >> and developers who refuse to use GitHub is huge, I have prepared
23 >> a script that opens Bugzilla bugs for GitHub pull requests
24 >> and bidirectionally copies comments between them, therefore allowing
25 >> Gentoo developers to handle pull requests via Bugzilla at their
26 >> convenience. However, it is currently waiting for review and approval
27 >> by Robin before it will get deployed.
28 >>
29 >> But even then, I need to make sure the developers will actually use it
30 >> politely. Developers can't really close those bugs 'because it's
31 >> GitHub', or 'attach a patch', or 'duplicate of #nnnnnn' (because
32 >> it's a synced bug, it can't be magically coerced into existing bug).
33 >> In fact, I mailed bug-wranglers about this already but I got no reply.
34 > I'd like to ask the Council to consider pros and cons of this issue
35 > with extreme care. Benefits and dangers of the integration with the
36 > proprietary GitHub service were discussed many times already,
37 > starting from [1].
38 >
39 > While the GitHub integration allows to receive a bit more
40 > contributions, it contains long-term dangers of the Gentoo Social
41 > Contract violation and loosing independence of the infrastructure
42 > and the development workflow itself.
43 >
44 > I propose that we should draw a line which should not be crossed to
45 > satisfy both the Social Contract and freedom of people to use
46 > whatever tools they want, including GitHub. As a first approximation
47 > I suggest the following:
48 >
49 > All connections with external infrastructure should be done in a
50 > such way, that in case this external infrastructure will instantly
51 > and permanently disappear, we should not loss any valuable data
52 > and metadata, including commits, commit history, discussions,
53 > patches, issues, bug reports and so on.
54
55 Thanks for this language Andrew. It reflects my concerns and I can
56 support it in the council.
57
58 >
59 > As far as I understand Mgorny's proposal, it implies that pull
60 > request issues and patches will be mirrored on bugzilla, but not
61 > patches themselves. In my opinion this is not acceptable, since
62 > violates both the Social Contract (by dependence on propietary
63 > metadata, such as GitHub issues (and pull request is a special type
64 > of issue on GitHub)) and Bugzilla's policy of having all patches
65 > attached to the Bugzilla.
66
67 I'm hopeful that Michal will be able to figure out a technical solution.
68
69 I have one situation where I wanted a user to post his patches to our
70 bugzilla for discussions but he did not. As a result I was unable to
71 discuss them on our bugzilla, nor commit them in their current state. I
72 could have discussed them on github but I did not want to create a long
73 discussion history there, since that's supposed to be on bugzilla. So
74 now what?
75 >
76 > I honestly do not understand why developers should be forced to
77 > violate the Social contract under the excuse of "being polite" to
78 > GitHub contributors nor why such actions should be allowed at all.
79 There may be a technical solution where we can mirror pull requests,
80 bugs and patches on bugzilla.
81
82 As a side note, this approach to pushing through agendas by creating
83 situations where its easier to accept a "solution" rather than reject it
84 is not going to work in Gentoo. We have lots of smart people that see
85 through this. If we wind up being "impolite" to our users, the blame
86 belongs to those who created that situation in the first place, not to
87 the council. The Social Contract is correct and I'm not going to
88 support anything that violates it.
89
90 >
91 > [1]
92 > https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/27e8b99db6fcd2654fc2548a605f0b70
93 >
94 > Best regards,
95 > Andrew Savchenko
96
97
98 --
99 Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D.
100 Gentoo Linux Developer [Hardened]
101 E-Mail : blueness@g.o
102 GnuPG FP : 1FED FAD9 D82C 52A5 3BAB DC79 9384 FA6E F52D 4BBA
103 GnuPG ID : F52D4BBA

Replies