On the need to move to a merge request workflow

Ján Tomko jtomko at redhat.com
Tue Mar 31 15:46:45 UTC 2020


On a Friday in 2020, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
>On Fri, Mar 27, 2020 at 02:15:01PM +0100, Peter Krempa wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 15:50:20 +0000, Daniel Berrange wrote:
>> > On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 02:10:59PM +0100, Peter Krempa wrote:
>> > > On Fri, Mar 06, 2020 at 11:44:07 +0000, Daniel Berrange wrote:
>> > > > We've discussed the idea of replacing our mailing list review workflow with
>> > > > a merge request workflow in various places, over the last 6 months or so,
>> > >
>> > > One thing I feel the need to voice until this is taken in place is a
>> > > matter of personal preference:
>> > >
>> > > I severely dislike the merge request workflow and I'll be severely
>> > > disappointed once we switch over to it.
>> >
>> > Can you elaborate on specific things you don't like, so we can see if
>> > there are any options to mitigate them ?
>>
>> - it's a web page
>>     - it's very slow on big projects and slow in general
>>     - it's ugly, "theme" support is a joke, white background burns my
>>       eyes
>>     - it works badly on a portrait display
>>     - mangles commit messages in an attempt to render them (link and
>>     signed-off line concatenated:
>>     https://gitlab.com/libvirt/libvirt/-/commit/e05dd1abdc3b3eeac6e12ab105e56138d783af2a
>
>This looks like a bug in their code which renders the messages. It is
>failing to preserve a newline character when it follows a hyperlink.
>I'll see about reporting this as an issue.
>
>>
>>
>> - usability
>>     - default view after opening a branch is "Files" not "commits"
>>     - web interface doesn't really carry information about which merge
>>       requests are new to me
>>
>> - review is terrible
>>     - threads are only single level
>>     - response can't be quoted (okay, they can but you have to copy and
>>       pase what you want to quote and then select that it's a quote)
>>     - you need to click to see the code
>>     - comments to code are in proportional font
>>     - a lot of useless clutter in the UI
>>     - need to click open comments in code
>>     - extra steps necessary to apply code locally (granted you get a
>>       branch by default, but fetching it is not as easy as I have with
>>       mail workflow)
>
>Overall the issues are primarily focused on the web UI, rather than
>the conceptual idea of the merge request workflow.

Well, many of the points in the original mail were actually against mailing
lists and not the simple merge-request-free workflow we are using thanks
to them :)

>I share the same
>view of many of these issues, but I do think we can mitigate most of
>it with a terminal based tool as an option for those who don't like
>the web UI.
>
>
>>     - review process favours review without actually fetching the code
>>       locally (if you can click a button, who will actually test that
>>       the code works?)
>
>If anything I feel the current email review makes me even less likely
>to actually apply & test the code locally, as it requires several tedious
>error prone steps, compared to being able to direct "git fetch" a ref
>for the merge request.
>
>The more automated testing we do the better, but either way we rely on
>reviewers to be diligent enough to decide when something needs some
>more testing.
>
>>
>>
>> Now I know you will suggest I try your 'bichon' tool for reviews as it
>> fixes a handful of the problems outlined above, but unfortunately that
>> comes with it's own set of problems since it's in infancy stage.
>
>Yes, it certainly isn't developed to where it needs to be yet, but I have
>started using it for real code review on libosinfo repos and found it is
>useful already.
>

Oh it already does stuff?

Time to file some issues then because I could not get it to do anything
useful.

Jano
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