Re: Updated Sourceware infrastructure plans

[Jonathan Wakely <jwakely.gcc@gmail.com>]

On Wed, 1 May 2024 at 20:19, Jeff Law via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 4/22/24 9:24 PM, Tom Tromey wrote:
> > Jason> Someone mentioned earlier that gerrit was previously tried
> > Jason> unsuccessfully.
> >
> > We tried it and gdb and then abandoned it.  We tried to integrate it
> > into the traditional gdb development style, having it send email to
> > gdb-patches.  I found these somewhat hard to read and in the end we
> > agreed not to use it.
> >
> > I've come around again to thinking we should probably abandon email
> > instead.  For me the main benefit is that gerrit has patch tracking,
> > unlike our current system, where losing patches is fairly routine.
> >
> > Jason> I think this is a common pattern in GCC at least: someone has an
> > Jason> idea for a workflow improvement, and gets it working, but it
> > Jason> isn't widely adopted.
> >
> > It essentially has to be mandated, IMO.
> >
> > For GCC this seems somewhat harder since the community is larger, so
> > there's more people to convince.
> I tend to think it's the principal reviewers that will drive this.  If
> several of the key folks indicated they were going to use system XYZ,
> whatever it is, that would drive everyone to that system.
>
> We're currently using patchwork to track patches tagged with RISC-V.  We
> don't do much review with patchwork.  In that model patchwork ultimately
> just adds overhead as I'm constantly trying to figure out what patches
> have been integrated vs what are still outstanding.

If patches sent by email exactly match what's committed, then the
update_gcc_pw.sh script that I run will correctly update patchwork to
say they're committed. I tend to only bother running that once a week,
because it misses so many and so is of limited use. If we are now
supposed to send generated files in the patches, and we discourage
people from committing something close-but-not-identical to what they
sent by email, then the script will do a better job of updating
patchwork, and then we should look at running it automatically (not
just when I think to run it manually).

I think there's still an issue where a patch has been superseded by a
v2 which has been committed. I don't think patchwork does a good job
of noticing that the v1 patch is no longer relevant, so somebody still
has to manually update those ones.

So overall, I agree that patchwork isn't the answer. It requires too
much manual housekeeping, and that's a huge task with the volume of
patches that GCC has.

>
> Patchwork definitely isn't the answer IMHO.  Nor is gitlab MRs which we
> use heavily internally.  But boy I want to get away from email and to a
> pull request kind of flow.
>
> jeff