Proposal: Add review tags to patch review workflow.

[Luis Machado]

Hi Joel,

Thanks for bringing this up.

On 9/26/22 17:42, Joel Brobecker via Gdb wrote:
> Just thinking out loud...
> 
>> I completely agree with the proposal.  I really like the fact that it
>> makes communication less ambiguous.  Following some process (or changing
>> the process) can feel a bit heavy for long-timers, but I think it makes
>> things much clearer for newcomers.
> 
> Speaking of ambiguous, one thing that we used to do well in the past
> but then kind of got worse was the subject prefix we used to use
> to indicate the status of a patch. In particular, we used to reserve
> certain keywords for that in the subject (e.g. "RFA" vs "PATCH", or
> "OB" for obvious, etc).  We lost that part, not sure exactly when,
> but I suspect sometime when we transitionned to Git.
> 
> Something else also that I have been feeling the last year or two
> is that I'm not sure people now explicitly confirm to the list
> when a patch is pushed.

I think that's been happening, yes. But the IRC bot mentions commits explicitly, and
developers tend to see updates in the git repo when they update the sources.

With that said, in general the frequent GDB contributors tend to be quite busy (with
GDB or other things), so I'm inclined to say it is positive to have less steps to
take care of to push a change.

For example, ChangeLog's were a big time sink, and we managed to get rid of that rule. I think
that was very positive.

We still have other potential improvements waiting to be discussed, like auto-formatting of code
with some tool like clang-format. Time spent correcting formatting is not very useful.

> 
> The reason I mention this is to show that perhaps we're getting back
> to the fact that our email reviewing system is still email-based.
> One way to address the various limitations is by adding more
> processes, as suggested here. This has the good property of being
> fairly cheap to discuss and implement, at the cost of a small
> added overhead. I don't have a strong opinion about it, either
> for or against (and given the amount of time I have to contribute
> anyway, I don't think I should have a say).
> 
> With that said, I have a feeling that switching to a system designed
> to manage patch submissions and reviews, no matter imperfect, is going
> to solve a lot of the limitations of the current email-based system.
> So that's another option worth reviewing from time to time, I think.
> I understand that selecting, deploying and trying new review systems
> requires a fair amount of effort. But having seen the benefits of
> using several different such systems, I am convinced that the gains
> will be very much worth whatever the drawbacks of that system might be.

That's a fairly good point, and I agree. We tried a patch reviewing system (gerrit)
before. For me, at the time, it was obvious that the number of reviews increased
significantly. It was just easier to do reviews that way. If you had 5 minutes, you
could scan for a small change and give some feedback. The list of patches to-be-reviewed
was never forgotten.

But back then we didn't want to risk alienating global maintainers that didn't like gerrit or
liked the e-mail system better, so we dropped that effort and put nothing back in its place. It feels
to me patch reviewing by non-contributors lost some of the traction it had gained with gerrit.

It is not a secret that some of us contributors would like to see improvements in this area, hence
my suggestion to address patch reviewing/more maintainers/CI-based testing as topics for the GDB BoF.

But at the end of the day, it's up to the global maintainers to make a decision on this topic, or to
let contributors know they are open to adopting improvements.

So, in summary, I see the proposal to add tags as a way to improve a patch reviewing system that
is not being capable of keeping up with demand. I doubt we would need such tagging if we had a
proper reviewing system in place (be it gerrit, patchworks or any other).

> 
>> Assuming we will go through with this proposal, it will need to be
>> documented on the wiki so we can easily refer people to the procedure.
>> Probably the ContributionChecklist page?
>>
>>    https://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/ContributionChecklist
>>
>> Will you be able to take care of this when needed (do you have write
>> access to the wiki)?
>>
>> In the mean time, message to others: please let us know if you agree
>> with this, it's difficult to know we have the support of the community
>> if everybody silently agrees!
>