Hello, On Sun 16 Jun 2019 at 08:08pm -0400, Sam Hartman wrote: > Dgit absolutely can be used to prepare a bunch of patches. But unless > the maintainer actually uses dgit, it's not clear that the result is > easier for the maintainer to merge than a well submitted patch via the > bts produced from apt-get source. > > (Yes, if you actually did an nmu, dgit clone users will benefit from the > dgit push). > > > But my reading of the discussion so far is that people see getting > patches actually integrated as a pain point. If I'm understanding our > private conversations, this is not your focus. > This is an area where I think your focus and the project's desires for > improvements are not aligned. > > In the debian-vote discussion people were talking about a eutopia where > every DD could push to every package. And if not push, then submit a > merge request. > > I think clarifying people's desires and understanding how critical being > able to push to a package and/or submit merge requests to it is will be > an important next step. This has not been at the forefront of the minds of those of us working on dgit, indeed, probably just because Ian and I are the kind of people who are quite happy with patches in the BTS rather than merge requests. However, ISTM that dgit as it already exists has a role to play in making it possible to submit merge requests against packages. Let's assume that we are not going to standardise on a single git workflow for packages on salsa -- the amount of time and effort to convert all maintainer views to a single workflow would be immense, and I doubt that the project actually wants to do this, having positive reasons, regarding technical diversity, for not doing it. (It's a dgit design goal not to require standardising the workflows of maintainer views, for roughly these reasons.) With that assumption made, however, submitting merge requests against maintainer views on salsa now faces the problem that doing so requires knowledge of the workflow the maintainer is using. We could try to write a tool which tries to guess and convert (e.g.) the dgit view with your changes into a maintainer workflow, but there are large obstacles to this working reliably. For example, there exist edge cases such that there is no algorithm which can determine, for any possible Debian source package tree committed to git, whether it is patches-applied or patches-unapplied. And there are so many small variations on workflows that such a tool would have to be very complex. It would seem, then, that what we want is merge requests against our interchange format: the source packages that actually get uploaded. Or, in other words, we want merge requests against the dgit view of packages. Presumably package maintainers to massage such a thing into a merge request against the maintainer view ... ? -- Sean Whitton
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