Re: Any concrete plans after the GDB BoF?

[Mark Wielaard <mark@klomp.org>]

Hi,

On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 02:47:35PM +0000, Andrew Burgess wrote:
> > Good or bad, my concern is that the younger generation views emails
> > as antiquated and at the same time they have grown up learning about
> > collaboration using systems such as GitLab or GitHub.
> 
> I'd avoid the word 'antiquated' as it (too me) seems to have negative
> connotations.
> 
> But I agree, many developers are familiar with a pull-request
> development model, and I think it has many advantages over our current
> way of doing things, I'd be very much in favour of switching to a PR
> style system.
> 
> That doesn't mean there aren't also advantages to how we do things
> today.

Yes. What I really like is that email based discussions of patches
makes it a real conversation about what we are doing. So I don't want
to loose that. But I do like some of the automation, especially
pre-commit testing and patch tracking.

Fact is that some people do find it hard to sent patches through
email. And if they don't submit the patch in the first place, there is
no conversation to be had.

For those that are comfortable with git (a requirement for many
projects these days), but get stuck on setting up git send-email or
attaching their patch in their email client, I would recommend
pointing new developers at the sourceware sourcehut mirror:
https://sr.ht/~sourceware/binutils-gdb

There they can interact with the repository through a website and let
sr.ht sent the patches for them (it will use git send-email for them,
but they can just click together their "pull request". And we get a
nice correctly formatted patch email that can then be discussed as
normal.

Some of the automation to test patches early is now provided by
builder.sourceware.org where you can push any patch to a user try
branch to make sure it at leasts builds, has correct python
formatting, and passes a subset of the testsuite on ~10 different
distros/arches.
https://builder.sourceware.org/buildbot/#/builders?tags=gdb-try

git-pw and b4 make it easy to interact with patchwork.sourceware.org
and inbox.sourceware.org.

The missing piece is connecting patchwork and buildbot so you have a
nice overview of which tests a patch passed/failed.

This is really what the Sourceware infrastructure roadmap is about
https://lwn.net/Articles/898655/

We aren't fully there yet, but are making nice progress
https://www.fsf.org/events/sourceware-infrastructure-a-presentation-and-community-q-a

Cheers,

Mark