contribution process

[cowwoc]

On 02/07/2014 3:26 PM, Augie Fackler wrote:
> How? Please elaborate. I've been doing review-by-email for 6 or 7 
> _years_ as the sole way I've been involved with tools like Mercurial. 
> I'd like specifics on how this is bad for potential contributors so I 
> can have meaningful conversations on how to improve our contribution 
> process for everyone. I'd really like to chase down /what/ about 
> patches-by-email is perceived to be awful. Right now I'm only hearing 
> that y'all hate it, but not WHY. 

My guess: bug trackers (and PRs) organize an issue's history into one 
place. The mailing list spreads that history over the course of many 
emails, making it hard for someone to review who did what, when, and 
why. And then there is the benefit of visual diffs that you don't get 
from a text-only medium like emails. Yes, you can load up those patches 
into an external diff program but that takes more time/effort.

>> I understand your reluctant to rely on non-OSS services, but I think people would benefit greatly from a better-organized, more visual contribution process as Github-style pull requests provide. I'm not asking you to stop accepting patches through the mailing list, but rather suggesting that accepting pull requests off Bitbucket would be a major step in the right direction.
> I've already stated how frustrating PRs are, both on BB and GH. That being a contribution mechanism for hg wouldn't be likely to get love from me or mpm, and I suspect the other reviewers would also not be fans of doing reviews there.
>
>
> [elided some "just try it", which I see as a nonstarter because it fragments the patch stream and the PR interface is lousy for reviewers in my experience]

I apologize for coming in on the tail-end of a conversation, but do you 
have a link to the aforementioned discussion? I'd like to better 
understand why mpm and you dislike PRs.

>
>> I think you could pretty easily generate mailing list traffic from pull requests, but not the other way around (as you seem to be asking).
> That's an interesting-ish option. Would we also be able to get the reviews posted back to the ML so that the list remains the sole source of truth about what's going on?

I believe Github does something similar. Anytime someone posts a comment 
in Github, you get a copy by email. Anyone replies to that email get 
posted as comments in the online system. Would this work for you?

Gili