On Tue, 06 Jun 2023 09:19:30 -0700 Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote: > Luca Boccassi <bluca@debian.org> writes: > > > Snarks aside, allowing merge requests to be open on Salsa in _addition_ > > to attachments to the BTS, as the vast majority of other packages > > already do, doesn't take away anything from you, but would add quite a > > lot for the rest of us, who find ourselves very limited and very much > > barrier-ized by clunky, old and painful email-based processes. > > Merge requests are useful when the goal is to be able to merge the merge > request as-is at the end of some code review process. My guess is that > this happens about 20% of the time with Policy. The other 80% of the time > I tweak wording or phrasing or formatting when applying the change, and > also add an upgrading-checklist entry and other bookkeeping that I don't > want to have to explain to everyone proposing new wording. > > Policy is not a program and we're not taking source code changes. The goal > of the discussion is to converge on the semantics of what we are going to > say, which often requires multi-paragraph discussions where the normal > tools of email such as quoting are more useful. I find trying to have an > email-style discussion in Salsa to be annoying and tedious. It also > fragments the record, whereas having it in the bug means I can, at any > time, load the entire bug into Gnus and re-read the discussion of how we > arrived at the decision in the same tool that I use for reading all other > Debian discussions. It depends on your pain threshold. For me it's much easier and simpler and less painful to do all of that on Salsa, as opposed to wade through a bunch of random emails and scrolling up and down through the BTS. I'm sure there were some suggestions earlier in the thread, that I now have forgotten about, and they will be lost because there's no way I'm going back wading through dozens of random replies to figure out what is applied and what is not. On Salsa, this would be an 'unresolved' review comment that I can click 'solved' once handled. I'm not suggesting that you stop using emails to send your changes - I'm simply asking to reconsider making policy work like the vast majority of other parts of Debian, and _also_ accepts merge requests on Salsa, in _addition_ to emails. Then the submitter can choose. I suspect you are going to get a lot more contributions this way, that is certainly the experience from other teams that have enabled Salsa from what I can hear (eg: kernel team). -- Kind regards, Luca Boccassi
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