Re: GNU GRUB maintenance

[Andrei Borzenkov]

On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 12:14 AM, Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello, all. I'm sorry for not being available to do enough maintenance
> for GRUB in last time but I was overbooked. Yet there is a good news. At
> Google there is a 20% project and GRUB has been approved as 20% project
> for me. The goal is to have 2.02 released before the end of this year.
> Other than the raw lack of time there is another issue which makes
> maintenance difficult: inefficient VCS.

VCS is actually OK. The project of size Linux kernel seems to work
well using pull request e-mails. The disadvantages are

- contributors must have repository available via Internet
- contributors are trusted to actually submit pull request for branch
that was reviewed
- it needs to be done locally and pushed

>                                                       It requires me or 
> someone with
> privileges manually copy the patch. What other systems would be ok? It
> obviously has to be a free software and hosted on free software-friendly
> hosting. It also has to have an efficient 1-click merge (so that someone
> with privileges can get any patch submitted to the system merged in
> couple of clicks).
>
>

It does not like like we have much choice. If we speak about free
external hosting, this is probably github, gerrithub, gitlab. I do not
know if any of them is considered friendly enough by FSF.

If we speak about self hosting, then it is probably gerrit and
reviewboard (I wish we could join KDE reviewboard, but grub hardly can
be called KDE application ... :) )

I am not thrilled by github workflows. From what I could gather
gerrithub looks more appealing, but would love to hear from someone
who actually used both.

One problem is that none of them apparently allows reviewing by
E-Mail. This worked (and probably works, just I'm no more involved)
quite well in KDE reviewboard. This means all review must be done via
web. For me it is rather disadvantage. Also merged requests are
removed, which means history and past discussions are no more present.
Which again is better using e-mail review.