The open-source generation gap

Posted May 24, 2016 4:24 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
Parent article: The open-source generation gap

> Meanwhile, online collaboration tools have become more "frictionless" as time has gone by. Consequently, older projects that place a heavy emphasis on GPG-signed releases and an email-driven patch review process have stuck with one generation of tools, while newer projects have picked up a newer generation of tools like GitHub's web-based issue tracker. So there is a practical disconnect, which is then exacerbated when people say (as one attendee put it) "we do things this way because that's what Linus does."

No one worries: patchwork is currently implementing an mailing-list-backed database (!) which will fix all these issues for good http://damien.lespiau.name/2016/02/augmenting-mailing-lis...

There's some irony seeing the community who invented git now lagging behind, stuck in email-based workflows and magical git scripts. Unless there's a another (decentralized?) database revolution coming soon? Bugzilla's replacement will be based on it!

PS: the closed BitKeeper -> open git -> closed GitHub irony has already been discussed here: https://lwn.net/Articles/686896/ (among other places)

The open-source generation gap

Posted May 24, 2016 4:51 UTC (Tue) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm not sure where you got "mailing-list-backed database" - that implies that the mailing list is the storage medium. Yes, the mailing list is still the input - but it isn't the database itself. Messages posted to the list that are patches are picked up by patchwork and loaded into a database, which allows patchwork's web interface perform well enough to be practical. That isn't part of what Damien has implemented, either - that's how patchwork has worked for years.

The open-source generation gap

Posted May 24, 2016 5:44 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

I did take a shortcut or two: everything is explained fantastically well in Damien's blog which is the only reason why I pointed at it - not because he implemented everything from scratch.

The general clumsiness and brittleness of automating populating a patch and review database from a mailing-list is relatively clear when reading Damien, especially for anyone having used any vaguely modern code review tool like Github. Comparing it to for instance Gerrit (not a very high bar...), the only area where patchwork might be barely ahead of Gerrit is around the concept of a series: a very recent addition I believe.