Re: How to get reviews on gerrit? aka. patches ignored for three years.

Hi Vadim, Patrick,

On Thu, Oct 05, 2023 at 11:18:19AM -0700, Vadim Bendebury wrote:
> I admittedly am very loosely familiar with the email based reveiw flow,
> my experience if from many years back, and I don't have fond memories of
> it :)

IMO sr.ht has innovated quite nicely here. Their ML manager (lists.sr.ht)
detects patches and shows things like status APPLIED/PENDING/NACKed (based
on git activity IIRC) and CI build status. Removing some of the legacy
objections to the git email workflow.

(Side note: The APIs are all open and built to be modular so jenkins
integration would likely not be hard)

Anyone can reply from the webinterface through their email client with a
mailto:// link or The "Forward this thread to me" button, which hast to be
the best ML invention since sliced bread eer I mean threads.

Notice: no account necessary. You just go ahead and do that thing you want
to do.

You can prepare/send patchsets from the webinterface (with an account) to
lower the entry barrier for not-yet git-email afficionados.

Until git(ea) PR federation through activitypub comes to fruition and is
widely adopted I'm putting my decentralized eggs into the git-email basket.

That being said I'm not sure this particular tool is right for
coreboot. I'm just saying in some aspects (barrier to contribute, community
building) this is perhaps the gold standard now.

> Just in case this is not known: in gerrit you can subscribe to receive
> emails about all patches sent to a git repo: you click on the cog in
> the top right, then on 'Notifications' on the next screen, and then you
> can configure what emails on what repositories you want to
> receive. Would this address your concern?

I didn't know that but IMO what gerrit sends out is absolutely not
equivalent to a normal patch ML.

> There's also the coreboot-gerrit mailing list (archive, although it
> doesn't thread emails properly, at
> https://mail.coreboot.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/latest)
> that can be subscribed to.
> 
> We used to have these emails end up on the main mailing list (for
> familiarity after we moved from a mailing list + svn based flow to Gerrit
> + git in 2011), but people complained that there's too much noise on the
> list.

I mean, look at the emails gerrit sends they're almost pure spam, IMO
that's another dimension of the problem with gerrit.

I'm overwhelemed enought by the gerrit emails I get from just my own
patches. When humans send patches and humans send replies to those patches
we don't get useless and unactionable mails like "attention is required by"
and "comments were posted" without the actual comments. I might want to
read those comments, Gerrit, grrrr!

I think this problem is multiplied because in gerrit everything is
per-patch rather than per-series. I've never had this much of a problem
with large series in gitlab even though it can be chatty too.

Something I've seen, but that may not work for coreboot is to keep gerrit
for project members/teams working closeley together, but allow [PATCH]
submission on the ML for outsiders.

idk. just a baseline for discussion.

--Daniel
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