contribution process

[Steve Barnes]

On 02/07/14 23:53, Angel Ezquerra wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 9:26 PM, Augie Fackler <raf at durin42.com> wrote:
>> On Jul 2, 2014, at 3:15 PM, cowwoc <cowwoc at bbs.darktech.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Augie,
>>>
>>> I brought up this topic because someone brought it up off-list in response to my post. I have never attempted to contribute to hg (mostly because my lack of Python experience) but I can definitely see how (quoting Paul) "emailing patches is a crummy process".
>> 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.
> I don't find it awful, but I don't find it great either, so perhaps I
> can comment on why I don't find it great (both as a contributor and as
> a reviewer (the latter mostly on the TortoiseHg project)).
>
> In short, I use gmail, and gmail sucks when used as a patches-by-email
> tool (it is otherwise a pretty great web based email tool, and that is
> why I use it in the first place). How does gmail suck?
>
> - It sucks for keeping track of patch series, specially for resends
> and new versions of series. Its threading code gets confused all the
> time when you resend a new version of a series. Worse, it does not
> always get confused in the same way. In particular, sometimes it will
> group some of the emails within a series resend with their previous
> versions but then it will not group the rest of the emails.
> - It sucks for getting patches _into_ a local mercurial clone. I don't
> know how you guys do it, but I manually select "show original" on
> every email in the series, copy the patch part and then import it
> using TortoiseHg's import from clipboard feature. This is incredibly
> time consuming for large patch series (to the point that I rarely
> check those out).
> - It sucks for keeping track of which patches were reviewed and which have not.
>
> I suspect other web based tools will have similar issues. Perhaps
> using a stand alone, local email client would solve these problems,
> but I don't think it is reasonable to expect contributors to change
> their preferred email tool.
>
> That being said, using patches-by-email does have some great features.
> I love that I can use gmail's search to look for patches. I also like
> the immediacy of the review process and how easy is to just make a
> short in line comment on someone else's patch.
>
> How could this be improved? One thing that would be neat is that each
> patch series had an associated pull link that one could use to pull
> the whole series into a local mercurial repo.
>
> Also, I don't think that mercurial's problem is a lack of contributors
> or features. IMHO if mercurial is somehow 'stagnating' it is only in
> terms of popularity, and only compared to git (probably due to
> git/github having reached a critical mass), not in terms of usefulness
> or development.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Angel
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>
Would it be possible to persuade mpm/Selenic to consider hosting a copy 
of ReviewBoard <https://www.reviewboard.org> this would allow 
contributors to submit their proposed changes with:

hg postreview

using the ReviewboardExtension.

I have to admit that I have yet to use it in anger but it looks good to me.

Gadget/Steve
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