Re: salsa.debian.org: merge requests and such

[Jacob Adams <tookmund@gmail.com>]

> On Oct 28, 2018, at 09:44, Jacob Adams <tookmund@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Oct 28, 2018, at 08:11, Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> wrote:
>> 
>> On Sat, Oct 27, 2018 at 12:46:00PM -0400, Jacob Adams wrote:
>>>> On Oct 27, 2018, at 09:20, Holger Wansing <hwansing@mailbox.org> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> It looks to me, that many merge requests are lying around on Salsa, but the
>>>> responsible package maintainers / teams are not aware of them.
>>> 
>>> The consensus seems to be that people should enable email notifications in
>>> salsa and open a bug when filing a merge request.
>> 
>> Except doing that manually just doesn't work:
>> * new maintainers don't know this bit of tribal knowledge
>> * it's obscure even for the oldies
>> * you're 99% likely to forget it when adding a new repo
>> 
>> Case in point: despite me having read the previous thread, and having set my
>> repos accordingly (I don't even remember how to do that anymore!), there's
>> a request rotting on a recent package:
>> https://salsa.debian.org/debian/boohu
>> https://salsa.debian.org/debian/boohu/merge_requests
>> 
>> I did make an unrelated upload of that package, but of course didn't notice
>> the request -- you typically don't touch salsa anymore if you use git's
>> command-line interface, and by default there's no notification whatsoever. 
>> So the fixes sit there, the contributor feels ignored, and improvements grow
>> conflicts with new upstream code.  Not cool.
>> 
>> So no, neither the maintainer nor the requester remember to do such extra
>> steps (they're not needed eg. on GitHub).  They must either be done
>> automatically or the GitLab functionality disabled or at least adorned with
>> in-your-face warnings.
> 
> I completely agree with you. The above is simply the best solution currently. 
> To quote from my last message in the previous thread:
> “My concern is that newcomers will have their merge requests ignored when maintainers are not emailed. I see no workable solution as yet, so I’ll have to look more into this and come back to this thread when I find one.”
> 
> I haven’t yet

Apologies, sent before completing my thought. 

I haven’t yet found a workable solution. Ideally we’d change the default notification settings in Salsa to always send emails but that won’t work because then all DDs would get emails about all the merge requests in the Debian group. 

Jacob