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

[Eike Hein]

On 09/19/2015 10:32 PM, Kevin Krammer wrote:
> I don't see there this github review is coming from.

Review is an interactive process where you ask for changes and
iterate. Once you open the door to doing it on GitHub, you will:

* Have a hard time making some contributors understand why
  they should go through the trouble of moving to Phabricator
  in the midst of the review process, or next time.

* Have a hard time making some KDE developers understand why
  they shouldn't just do it on GitHub.

I don't understand why you expect thinks like "if it matters
people will take it to RB/Phab as second stage" or "after the
first patch we ask someone to get an account and switch to
Phab" will happen as a matter of course. It's so much more
likely that people who are comfortable with GitHub will ask
those who don't to comply (monitor it for requests, respond
to requests, participate), or they just won't be able to agree.

That's why I keep saying ... everything about this converges
on GitHub either being a full second review tool that is 100%
parallel to Phab, or not at all. Any other scenario is just
not viable: per-project opt-in can't work because the problems
just replicate on a smaller scale (see other subthread) and
two-stage review has way too much resistance and creating a
bot bridge between the two apps is too lossy.

So IMHO the debate should be entirely about whether we want
GitHub as a full second review tool or not. Some of the costs
to doing that are:

* We will lose some developers who don't agree with this.
* We will lose the benefits of having a single review tool
  (simplicity, efficiency, ...).
* We risk shrinking our infrastructure competence by making
  people less motivated to work on our own infrastructure.
* In turn we risk hurting the free infrastructure ecosystem
  which KDE has historically been a contributor to (e.g.
  we contributed to gitolite and other packages when we
  created git.kde.org).
* This arguably risks running counter to our mission of pro-
  liferating free software.
* It might hurt our integrity in the eyes of some people.
* It might hurt our viability as an independent project host
  community in the eyes of some people.
* Some people will enjoy working on KDE less.


Some of the potential gains are:
* Some people might enjoy working on KDE more because they
  really like GitHub.
* Some people might see it as a positive going-with-the-
  times step.
* We will possibly gain an additional contribution channel
  that has been suggested we can't really tap otherwise
  and could really use.


So this debate is about:

* Which of these do you feel more strongly about.

* Which of these do you think is easier to build a consensus
  around.


Cheers,
Eike