Re: Revisiting the utility of branch notifications

[Petr Kovar <pmkovar gnome org>]

On Sat, 16 Mar 2019 18:38:24 +0100
Petr Kovar <pmkovar gnome org> wrote:

> 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?

... and answering my own question:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/Infrastructure/issues/124

Cheers,
pk