[kde-community] What is a GitHub pull request exactly?

[Eike Hein]

On 09/19/2015 09:55 PM, Kevin Krammer wrote:
> Exactly.
> So why would one continue to do the prelimiary review in addition to the 
> required one?
> As soon as there is a stream of patches from a new contributor, that 
> contributor will be asked to get an account of their own.
> Need for preliminary review or patch proxying removed, ideal situation 
> established.

Except the pro-GitHub side specifically argues for
GitHub as increasing the frequency of first patch
submissions, so the total amount of work spent on
dealing with them increases. This is on some level
a "nice problem to have", but creates a pressure to
drop two-stage review and use GitHub as a primary
channel to optimize that channel. I.e. once again
leading me to the conclusion that two-stage review
is simply not viable and runs counter to what the
proposal wants to achieve.


> Developers cooperating on a patch or patchset before review submission is 
> nothing new.

This sort of "we have a precedent for this" argument
comes up a lot, but is often a really poor argument
because it doesn't establish that precedent was
actually a positive experience or a desirable
situation. "We've had this problem before" does not
justify "let's have more of that problem". "We are
already unhappy" doesn't justify "then let's make
decisions that create more unhappyness". It's about
what our decisions shift us toward next; precedents
are mostly about learning from them (e.g. the unhappy-
ness we've seen from having multiple review tools).


> I am afraid I didn't get that one.

There will be strife around both refusing to use GitHub
and wanting to use GitHub exclusively.


> I don't think this would be a good idea.
> The only review that counts in the end is the one all KDE developers have 
> access to. Which is Phab.

I agree that GitHub has an inclusivity problem, and this
subthread has been mostly about why that inclusivity pro-
blem can't really be avoided and the problems that would
arise from having two tools at once without a consensus
addressing inclusivity. For some reason that leads you to
"win-win-win scenario" (unless that was sarcasm ... I
really couldn't tell) and me to "maybe we shouldn't then".

I'm sorry I can't write a more in-depth reply, but I find
several of your thoughts really hard to follow/understand -
we seem to be in very, very different places on how we
perceive the reality of development work or how humans
behave in practice or something. I think we'll have to
leave it at this and perhaps find out how persuasive
either of us appears to the undecided.


Cheers,
Eike