Changes to our Git infrastructure

[Boudewijn Rempt]

I'm just trying to make clear that reviewboard is a crappy tool inciting 
people to write crappy reviews that drive people away. Apart from any 
other nonsense about cultural differences (the standard cop-out from 
Dutchmen and Germans -- I ain't rude, I'm just honest, it's cultural!), I 
think that people should read Ian's mail, with attention:

"Speaking for myself, I find this a huge turnoff in the KDE world and am 
now planning to retire from KDE as soon as I can.  But then I am 76 and 
git is my 10th source-code control system since 1965-66, so I have little 
interest in mastering it.

I have also found ReviewBoard utterly counter-productive this year, either 
because one writes an entry and nobody reviews it, or nobody understands 
it, or because one gets nitpicked about syntax and white space when one is 
really looking for helpful advice about how better to solve the problem at 
hand. I think I must have lost a month or two on ReviewBoard during the 
year, with very little helpful advice gained."

I consider nitpick reviews harmful. If you have nothing better to do than 
nitpick, don't, and reviewboard is a tool which encourages you to do.

On Mon, 5 Jan 2015, Thomas Lübking wrote:

> On Montag, 5. Januar 2015 22:58:43 CEST, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
>
>> For me, personally, RB's mails are even worse.
> Ok, but that's pretty much OT, isn't?
>
>> (Same problem with this thread, or rather mailing list. Why the 
>> heck do I need to get two copies of every reply to a mail of 
>> mine... One is _enough_. And yes, I know about the whole 
>> reply-to-mangling-is-dangerous lunacy.)
> You get them, because you send them. kcd is cc'd by your mails what will in 
> the end make mail clients "reply to all" rather than just to the mailing 
> list.
>
>
>
>> Reviewboard isn't limited to kde-core-devel.
> It's not only not limited, it's not even bound to kcd.
> The receivers depend on the groups you attach to the RR.
>
>
>> And it doesn't answer my main complaint: reviewboard, by its design, is 
> made
>> to whine about whitespace, extra white at the end of lines and 
>> other one-line complaints.
>
> a) breaking coding style is bad style anyway. Get a better editor, don't 
> introduce tabs and trailing spaces and weird indention etc. and there'll be 
> no complains.
>
> b) You missed my argument.
> MANY ppl. can give you an abstract review ("whitespace", "hot loop, performs 
> crap", "this may crash") but only VERY FEW ppl. can make a feature comment.
> If none of the latter ever shows up because the component has vacant 
> maintainance, you might oc. feel that "ppl. only nitpick", but the 
> alternative is that your patch remains entirely uncommented and if you at 
> some point just push it, you'd introduce unnecessary style breaks and bad 
> code on top of that.
>
>> It gives the reviewer a happy feeling of a job well-done
> That's nonsense. It ideally maintains general code quality by "many eyes".
> If you are in charge of a component and have fundamental comments, you 
> certainly won't restrict yourself to comment the patch on an abstract level.
>
>> and the submitter a cold shower.
> Eye of the beholder?
> It's a tasklist. Nothing more, nothing less.
> If that scares you, you probably would not want to hear fundamental concerns 
> at all.
>
> There might be a cultural gap between rather "polite" ("lying") and rather 
> "direct" ("offending") societies, but that won't be fixed by any communcation 
> tool in the near future.
>
> Cheers,
> Thomas
>