Re: Revisiting the utility of branch notifications

[Petr Kovar <pmkovar gnome org>]

On Thu, 14 Mar 2019 16:55:05 -0400
Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:

> Sit back and let Uncle Shaun tell you a story. A long time ago, GNOME
> releases just kind of happened, and docs either happened with them or
> they didn't. Usually they didn't. Then we implemented release schedules
> with freezes. That helped the docs team a lot. We were able to start
> documenting as of feature freeze without worrying much about everything
> changing out from underneath us.
>
> The only problem was that we weren't always sure when things branched
> for new development. This was back in the CVS or SVN days. I'm not
> sure. My memory is hazy. But we just didn't know. And back in those
> days, we had to build everything ourselves, which was time consuming.
> We didn't have Flatpaks. We didn't have Boxes. This might have even
> been before jhbuild. So we required maintainers to send us an email
> when they branched.
>
> Then we switched to git, and we discovered we could just send those
> notification emails automatically, which made maintainers' lives a lot
> easier. And emails were more reliable, which made it easier for us to
> spend too much time building software.
>
> My question is, are these notifications still useful? Because there are
> a lot of them, far more than the volume of real human conversation.

Dear uncle Shaun, I think you've asked a good question. I could only think
of why those notifications could be useful for translators who need to
configure branches in Damned Lies manually after module branching, but for
docs, I say let's get rid of them.

Is https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/Infrastructure/issues now the
right place to file a sysadmin request?

Thanks,
pk