Re: [BuildStream] Proposal: spreading responsibility and maintainership [Was: 1.4 Release timeline]

[Angelos Evripiotis <angelos evripiotis gmail com>]

Hello!

Some minor good news on one point:

On Wed, Dec 12, 2018 at 6:20 AM Tristan Van Berkom via
BuildStream-list <buildstream-list gnome org> wrote:
[...]
> On Tue, 2018-12-11 at 20:28 +0000, Laurence Urhegyi wrote:
> [...]
> > >    - Only file merge requests when you are actually ready to request
> > >      a merge.
> >
> > In principle I agree, as this will hugely decrease notifications, but I
> > know how useful the comments/discussions on a WIP MR can be for
> > developers. Will leave it up to others to comment though.
>
> I don't disagree at all with that, but gitlab doesn't have a feature
> for it, it doesn't even have a feature to look at the merge requests UI
> and exclude the WIP merge requests.
>
> While people can discuss their branches outside of gitlab, we cannot
> produce a clean feedback loop which excludes WIP stuff with the current
> gitlab limitations, and I strongly believe that including developers in
> the feedback loop is a necessary step towards empowering developers and
> putting the developers in the driver seat.

GitLab actually does let you filter the WIP requests in the merge requests UI:
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/merge_requests/work_in_progress_merge_requests.html#filtering-merge-requests-with-wip-status

I updated the contributing guide to underscore the importance of WIP,
and linked to that documentation:
https://docs.buildstream.build/CONTRIBUTING.html#merge-requests

For example, here is that MR filter applied to BuildStream:
https://gitlab.com/BuildStream/buildstream/merge_requests?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=opened&wip=no

For the notifications, I'm looking at sharing some useful RSS feeds
for folks that want to stay on top of everything. One of the things it
could do is separate WIP updates from non-WIP. I think that's probably
already possible with email filters, although I'm using these RSS
feeds instead myself.

Personally I've found the WIP MR thing to be a useful way to track my
own work, and it's been useful for getting early feedback on stuff.

Cheers!
Angelos