[Development] GitHub Pull requests

[Max Paperno]

Just wanted to chime in as a "could be" Qt dev. Lowering the barrier to 
entry by allowing use of familiar tools could be a benefit IF you're 
looking for more contributions. I'm sure there's effort involved to 
allow this, and maybe it's not practical in the end, but perhaps worth 
considering/looking into.

You could look at it as one step less than what's suggested in the 
Contributor Guidelines under "A Shortcut...":

"If you have only a minor contribution to make and find the process out 
of proportion for that, you may simply attach a patch to a bug report. 
However, the more of the necessary steps you defer to the code's 
maintainers, the less likely is your contribution to be integrated in a 
timely manner."

I did just that recently, submitted a short patch to the docs generation 
system via a bug report. Not a big deal, but it could easily have been 
an actual code commit w/out the extra step of someone needing to process 
the bug and apply the patch themselves... and some code got mixed in/up 
in the process so the final change was actually a bit less "clean" than 
what I had posted.

This could also be a "gateway method" for bringing the more serious 
contributors into the actual gerrit-based process.  ;-)

2¢,
-Max


On 3/10/2020 10:40 AM, Cristian Adam wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> With the “GitHub issues” E-Mail thread we made sure the Issues are gone
> 
> from the projects.
> 
> What about Pull requests?
> 
> For example qtbase <https://github.com/qt/qtbase/pulls> has 7 pull 
> requests.  Usually people point out that
> 
> the Qt project uses a different collaboration method:
> 
> https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_Contribution_Guidelines
> 
> What stops us from accepting the contributions via GitHub?
> 
> Is it:
> 
>  1. The CLA
>  2. Qt Account
> 
> For the CLA one can simply add an instance of:
> 
> https://github.com/cla-assistant/cla-assistant
> 
> And it’s only one click away.
> 
> When I contributed to vcpkg, the process of signing the Microsoft
> 
> CLA was like that, one click.
> 
> Regarding Qt Account, maybe one can use the GitHub account to
> 
> create a Qt Account via openid.
> 
> With GitHub actions (or Azure Pipelines, like vcpkg) we can also validate
> 
> the pull requests.
> 
> We should encourage developers to contribute to Qt, not having to learn
> 
> how to use gerrit, and using a workflow that they are familiar with, should
> 
> be a plus.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Cristian.
>