Re: [Caml-list] Doing compiler patch review with a dedicated mailing-list

[Adrien Nader <adrien@notk.org>]

On Mon, Jan 13, 2014, Gabriel Scherer wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 12:14 PM, Daniel Bünzli
> <daniel.buenzli@erratique.ch> wrote:
> > It's not only easy to browse, it's *great* to browse: all the web-based mailing list archives I interact with are not even able to follow a thread running across two month. I really feel we're in 2014.
> 
> This is a bit too snarky for me to guess what you want.
> 
> I'm already doing a few reviews on mantis, and occasionally uses the
> github in-patch-commenting interface when people send a link to a
> github-hosted patch (eg. http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=6274
> ). I would be ready to experiment with a mailing-list or a specialized
> review tool, based on what people would prefer. We have a solid github
> mirror in place ( github.com/ocaml/ocaml ), people of OCamllabs have
> kindly offered to host mailing-lists on several occasions, and have
> experimented with, for example, gitlab in the past.
> 
> People of the list, if you have sent or reviewed patches or consider
> doing so in the future, do you have a strong preference? If your
> peer/friend/colleague wishes to contribute and asks you the place to
> go, what will you wish we had?
> 
> (Keep in mind that we don't have a lot of patches sent around for now
> (less than a dozen a month), and even less people*time to do the
> reviews, so we don't necessarily need a highly tuned über-process.)

Reducing reviewer work and/or having more reviewers was the actual goal
behind my proposal.
Another core aspect is that setting up a mailing-list and putting up a
"howto contribute" page takes a few minutes of work unlike migrations of
whole systems or the use of forges(*).

I was also not thinking of replacing patches and reviews on mantis, more
having an additional tool to conduct code review although, of course, I
would prefer a single place for that. In any case, having something
agreed upon and documented is probably what matters most.

On a personal note, I also prefer getting fed with emails for which I
will use a decent client with an editor I enjoy rather than a web
browser (especially when there's flash on the pages).

(*) A word about phabricator too: it has some very nice things on paper
and on demo but I've found it makes things easier for frequent
users/devs and very bad for others

-- 
Adrien Nader