Pulling GitHub into the kernel process

Posted Jun 24, 2021 13:22 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: Pulling GitHub into the kernel process by laf0rge
Parent article: Pulling GitHub into the kernel process

I'm not seeing anything about "move the Linux contribution workflow to GitHub". It's more "make GitHub a viable onramp to contributing". Everything still ends up on the ML, but maybe there'd be a single place to find out about the entire history of a change. Review comments, change over time, the status of its journey to Linus' tree, etc.

For example, I fixed a bug that was reported by some automated test setup. I used the same set of Cc emails and sent it off. However, it was missing the list that needed to hear about the patch. It wasn't until I pinged after a week of silence that this had been realized. Why did it miss the target list? I don't know, but checkpatch and whatever hooks `send-email` has didn't figure it out (and there were a dozen+ emails already, so spotting a missing one wasn't easy).

So this isn't about going anywhere near what BitKeeper was. It's about adding more roads to Rome and putting up better signage and helpful tourist centers along the way.

Pulling GitHub into the kernel process

Posted Jun 24, 2021 22:21 UTC (Thu) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link] (2 responses)

> there'd be a single place to find out about the entire history of a change. Review comments, change over time, the status of its journey to Linus' tree, etc.

As long as GitHub doesn't decide to garbage collect those commits, of course. And the delta between submissions of the same patch would be inaccessible from the web interface, because there's no way to do a range-diff from upstream to a PR.

GitLab is better, but not too much.

Pulling GitHub into the kernel process

Posted Jun 24, 2021 22:52 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Yes, I agree that GitHub's interface is subpar for workflows that rewrite patches a lot. I'm not disputing that. I think it's that people think it's "Github or nothing".

In any case, ghostflow could push its check refs to the repository to force them to not be garbage collected. Any other system could probably also do the same.

Pulling GitHub into the kernel process

Posted Jun 25, 2021 12:53 UTC (Fri) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link]

The delta is accessible on Github too nowadays - there's a notitication line in the PR when a force push happens: "<USER> force-pushed the <USER>:<BRANCH> branch from 1234 to 5678 x time ago", and the "force-pushed" text is a link that opens the delta before/after the force push.