Re: thoughts on a Merge Request based development workflow

[Han-Wen Nienhuys <hanwen@google.com>]

On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 2:00 PM Daniel Vetter <daniel@ffwll.ch> wrote:
> > Today, this can be easily done by cc'ing the patch to multiple mailing
> > lists.  Exactly how this works may get tricky, especially in the
> > federated model where (for example) perhaps the btrfs tree might be
> > administered by Facebook, while the xfs tree might be administrated by
> > Red Hat.  Given that we *also* have to support people who want to keep
> > using e-mail during the transition period, it may be that using
> > unauthenticated e-mail messages where comments are attached quoted
> > patch hunks, perhaps that can be the interchange format between
> > different servers that aren't under a common administrative domain.
>
> Last time I looked none of the common web ui tools (gerrit, gitlab,
> github) had any reasonable support for topic branches/patch series
> that target multiple different branches/repositories. They all assume
> that a submission gets merged into one branch only and that's it. You
> can of course submit the same stuff for inclusion into multiple
> places, but that gives you separate discussion tracking for each one
> (at least with the merge/pull request model, maybe gerrit is better
> here), which is real bad.

Can you say a little more about what you expect when working with
multiple branches/repos?

In gerrit, you can assign freeform tags ("topics") to changes, to
group them. See eg.

  https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/q/topic:"rename-reviewdb-package"+(status:open%20OR%20status:merged)

this will let you group changes, that can be in different repos and/or
different branches. See also
https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/Documentation/intro-user.html#topics

Discussions are tied to a single commit, but you can easily navigate
between different changes in topics, and submission is synchronized
(submitting one change will submit all of the topic. it's
unfortunately not atomic).

This is how submissions to Android work, as Android is stitched
together from ~1000 repos. It is likely that this support will further
improve, as Android is one of our biggest internal key customers.

-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys - Google Munich
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