Re: [gentoo-project] Call for Agenda Items -- Council Meeting 2015-10-11

[Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@gentoo.org>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3483 bytes --]

Hello all,

On Wed, 30 Sep 2015 20:45:10 +0200 Michał Górny wrote:
> The second issue that may need Council's attention is developers'
> attitude towards pull request source via GitHub.
> 
> One and a half month since enabling it, we already had almost 150 pull
> requests from Gentoo users (and a few Gentoo developers who use this as
> a collaboration tool). Sadly, some developers not only refuse to use
> GitHub (which is an acceptable choice) but also have very negative
> attitude towards users submitting pull requests and the developers
> helping with them.
> 
> The point is, if we want users to submit pull requests, we should be
> handling them. Then we can't really agree on some developer refusing to
> look at the request, and requesting the user to re-send it some other,
> less convenient way. Or another developer just silently ignoring every
> request and rudely responding to pings.
> 
> Since the amount of work necessary to proxy between users
> and developers who refuse to use GitHub is huge, I have prepared
> a script that opens Bugzilla bugs for GitHub pull requests
> and bidirectionally copies comments between them, therefore allowing
> Gentoo developers to handle pull requests via Bugzilla at their
> convenience. However, it is currently waiting for review and approval
> by Robin before it will get deployed.
> 
> But even then, I need to make sure the developers will actually use it
> politely. Developers can't really close those bugs 'because it's
> GitHub', or 'attach a patch', or 'duplicate of #nnnnnn' (because
> it's a synced bug, it can't be magically coerced into existing bug).
> In fact, I mailed bug-wranglers about this already but I got no reply.

I'd like to ask the Council to consider pros and cons of this issue
with extreme care. Benefits and dangers of the integration with the
proprietary GitHub service were discussed many times already,
starting from [1].

While the GitHub integration allows to receive a bit more
contributions, it contains long-term dangers of the Gentoo Social
Contract violation and loosing independence of the infrastructure
and the development workflow itself.

I propose that we should draw a line which should not be crossed to
satisfy both the Social Contract and freedom of people to use
whatever tools they want, including GitHub. As a first approximation
I suggest the following:

  All connections with external infrastructure should be done in a
  such way, that in case this external infrastructure will instantly
  and permanently disappear, we should not loss any valuable data
  and metadata, including commits, commit history, discussions,
  patches, issues, bug reports and so on.

As far as I understand Mgorny's proposal, it implies that pull
request issues and patches will be mirrored on bugzilla, but not
patches themselves. In my opinion this is not acceptable, since
violates both the Social Contract (by dependence on propietary
metadata, such as GitHub issues (and pull request is a special type
of issue on GitHub)) and Bugzilla's policy of having all patches
attached to the Bugzilla.

I honestly do not understand why developers should be forced to
violate the Social contract under the excuse of "being polite" to
GitHub contributors nor why such actions should be allowed at all.

[1]
https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/27e8b99db6fcd2654fc2548a605f0b70

Best regards,
Andrew Savchenko

[-- Attachment #2: Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 819 bytes --]