[Development] GitHub Pull requests

[Robert Löhning]

Am 11.03.20 um 06:13 schrieb Thiago Macieira:
> On Tuesday, 10 March 2020 07:40:41 PDT 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
> 
> It is:
> 1. The CLA
> 3. The CI
> 4. We already have a review system, we should not have two.
> 
> You usay there's a way to have the CLA accepted in GitHub. Ok.
> 
> We ought not to have two places where code reviews happen for a specific 
> module. That's just inviting sync issues. And this is assuming the CI is 
> solved: right now, ours is the only authoritative entity that can push to our 
> repositories in Qt. As far as I know, this is not a supported workflow in 
> GitHub at all. It wasn't supported in Gerrit either before us -- we had to 
> hire a consulting company to write the feature for us.
> 
> That only leaves having some modules switch wholesale	from our CI and from 
> Gerrit to GitHub, using whatever review mechanism and CI can be obtained with 
> GitHub, while other modules remain with Gerrit+Coin.
> 
> Why would we do that?
> 

Hi,

after having worked in a project in GitHub for a couple of months now
and seeing their CI from the user perspective, this sounds feasible to me.

- changes are CI-tested individually, not as a random mixture of
unrelated changes
- changes are first tested using cheap computing time, there's no need
to invest expensive developer's time first
- the progress and results are comprehensible, you can look at the CI
run just like you look at your local console window, in real time

Why would we not do that?

In addition, we wouldn't have to maintain the platform anymore.

Cheers,
Robert