Re: [gentoo-proxy-maint] Posting patches on this mailing list instead of using GitHub

[Ralph Seichter]

* Haelwenn Monnier:

> It's not to jump the queue, in fact I get about the same lag in my
> experience between GitHub PRs and using email. But it's much less
> predictable.

I don't understand the second sentence; what X is less predictable than
what Y, and why? As for the first sentence, I have my doubts, because
with less than 1% of contributors posting email patches, the ones that
do are very much "in your face" about it.

> I'd rather avoid GitHub completely, I do use it from time to time but
> because I have to.

I respect your right to dislike GitHub, but this is not about you alone
but about having automated CI checks and a unified means of letting the
proxy-maint members doing their volunteer job, in their own time, in a
comfortable way. Disclaimer: I do not speak for the P-M team, nor do I
claim to.

Another important aspect is that, by using GitHub, you allow only the
interested parties to subscribe to your pull requests (and I assume very
few would be interested). Posting patches here is, again, "in your
face", because rather than individually opting in on GitHub PRs, you are
forcing people to opt out every time you post a patch. I consider this
both impolite and annoying.

> And while sending via GitHub sometimes works I also got at least one
> PR later reverted because it didn't get a proper ACK from the
> maintainers, if I have to also ping them through email, why not just
> send the patch via email?

Because one of your PRs being met with a hiccup does not remotely
justify skipping the agreed-upon, preferred method of contribution
altogether.

There are OSS projects that use email-based patches successfully and
consistently, like "Notmuch" does. Howevery, Notmuch has the necessary
infrastructure to deal with these patches, and a culture of reviewing
these patches on the mailing list. Gentoo does not operate this way.

> There is also the problem of having to sync your repo to GitHub, if I
> forget to push gentoo's master to my fork I end up having to send all
> the past history manually, and I discovered this one quite later on.

You must be joking, right? Synchronising two Git remotes is no more
complicated than using "git send-email", and even if it was, learning to
use Git is mandatory. I remember nearly making a mess of my very first
pull request because of a Git-related mistake, which other people
obviously noticed. I assure you that I never made that mistake again,
and I am confident you can manage as well.

> Finally, I don't have this issue but github isn't available to
> everyone depending on where they live, and often a VPN isn't an
> option there, so another option needs to exists.

As I wrote right off the bat: I know patches *may* be posted here. That
does not imply they should, especially if the author, like yourself,
admittedly has the ability to use GitHub instead, which is clearly the
preferred method of contributing. If GitHub is an option, posting
patches here is both unnecessary and rude, in my opinion.

-Ralph