Re: Current status of the GNOME Github mirror

[Andrea Veri <av gnome org>]

2015-05-06 8:41 GMT+02:00 Philip Withnall <philip tecnocode co uk>:

> We could have a CONTRIBUTING.md which suggests that bug _discussion_
> happens in Bugzilla, I guess.

This is definitely a good point. Accepting pull requests is not bad
per se as many people might see having yet another account in Bugzilla
as enough to not contribute at all. What I've seen though, especially
on the ostree case, has been Github being used for the entire
workflow: from the submit of the patches themselves, the discussions
behind them, any possible proposed change and the final push to
git.gnome.org. This is totally fine but goes further ahead from the
original scope of the mirror. The idea we had in mind when we launched
it was to make our code available to a vast majority of users. We
introduced a FAQ with all the possible ways to contribute but we
didn't take into account we couldn't disable PRs on our organization
as the feature is still not available on the Github hosting platform.

Contributions of any kind and sent to Github should not be wasted and
contributors encouraged. At the same time we should make sure our
workflow and contributing guidelines are respected. After hearing your
opinions I would take the following actions:

 1. Introduce a CONTRIBUTING.md file with the following text* for all
the repositories except the ones that don't want to be affected.
(opt-out)
 2. Make use of Bugzilla for discussing patches further than a single
"Thanks for your contribution, patch has been merged" message
 3. Allow maintainers to close PRs if the code has been merged already
(thanks Bastien!). If a patch is straightforward to apply and it's
fine for the maintainer to go ahead why asking the contributor to
attach it to Bugzilla? This might just discourage the user and the
contribution will get lost. I still have to find out a way to map
maintainers with their Github account as it probably differs in many
cases from their respective GNOME handle. As said we don't want
contributors and contributions to get lost so having interested
maintainers looking and being notified by Github PRs is definitely a
way to accomplish the above.


* """The GNOME contributing guidelines require patches to be
forwarded to GNOME's Bugzilla instance hosted at
https://bugzilla.gnome.org. Please do not open GitHub pull requests
against this module as they will be ignored. More information is
available at the following wiki page:

   https://wiki.gnome.org/Sysadmin/GitHub""";

-- 
Cheers,

Andrea

Debian Developer,
Fedora / EPEL packager,
GNOME Infrastructure Team Coordinator,
GNOME Foundation Board of Directors Secretary,
GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee Chairman

Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av