[llvm-dev] Enable Contributions Through Pull-request For LLVM

Thu Nov 7 01:06:29 PST 2019

-1 from me as well. GitHub UI feels extremely sluggish with large
projects, forks feel like needless hurdles to jump over,
especially for small patches - having to fork the entire monorepo,
just to do a GitHub PR would be extremely cumbersome.

Just recently I submitted a very tiny PR for PcapPlusPlus on GitHub
which involved:
1). Forking the repository
2). Cloning the fork
3). Applying the patch
4). Pushing it and creating a PR.
5). Deleting the fork (Since I didn't want it cluttering up my account
and I'm not a regular contributor to PcapPlusPlus).

Neither the pull request mechanism nor GitHub issues feel like they're
suitable for large projects since it's common to see large GitHub
projects with ignored issues and worse filtering/categorizing. And PRs
as a review mechanism are far worse than Phabricator or any other
dedicated code review software, and I think a lot of GitHub projects
use internal or separate code review tools as-is, with PRs being
second class citizens and are more prone to getting derailed. It's not
uncommon for GitHub issue or PR discussions to turn into massive
threads that quickly turn into bikeshedding and off-topic conversations.

It also feels like this will inevitably force people to use external
tools to handle it, instead of just being able to use Git on its
own (something like `git cl` comes to mind, which some may like and
some may not).

And Roman raised a lot of good points regarding other, more
bureaucratic aspects of GitHub and it raising the bar for existing
contributors.

Just my two cents in.

On Thu, Nov 7, 2019 at 8:09 AM Roman Lebedev via llvm-dev
<llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
> Strong -1 personally.
>
> * What is the endgoal? To fully kill phab and move to github pullrequests?
>   it might be best to discuss *that* first. (did i miss an RFC?)
> * Separation of attention - does everyone who cares
>   now has to also look at pull requests for reviews;
>   or should they be exempt from general review attention?
> * For me personally after using phabricator, github now seems
>   extremely crude, laggy, limited. To name a few:
>   * There is no way to see previous version of the patch.
>     I don't think there is any way to disable force-push for PR's.
>     While this is only 'slightly' limiting for the reviewer,
>     this can be more limiting for the author - how do i go back
>     to previous revision? I can't, i need to maintain a copy
>     of every branch i pushed manually.
>   * Impossible to chain reviews - a PR diff can only be made
>     on top of git master branch. Any non-trivial change consists of
>     separable PR's. Now either one will only be able to submit
>     dependent PR after the prereqs are merged, or the diff will be
>     impossible to read.
>   * Does not load large diffs by default.
>     That caught me by surprise several times
>     when i was searching for something.
>   * No diffs in mail - *super* inconvenient.
>     One has to open each pr in browser (or fetch via git etc etc)
>   * Github is an official US-based commercial organisation.
>     It *has* to follow U.S. export law. In particular i'm thinking of
>       https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/29/github-ban-sanctioned-countries/
>       https://github.com/tkashkin/GameHub/issues/289
>     Does phabricator already have such restrictions, blocks?
>     If not, wouldn't you say adding such restrictions is not being
>     more open for contributors?
>     What happens when, in not so long in the future, the entirety of, say,
>     china or russian federation is blocked as such?
>   * Same question can be asked about internet "iron" curtains
>     certain (*cough*) countries are raising. That also has already happened
>     before (and *will* happen again), and i was personally affected:
>       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub#Russia
>     I don't recall that happening to phabricator yet.
>     I fail to see how that is more contributor-friendly.
>   * Not sure anyone cares, but while using github as main git
>     repository "mirror" is perfectly fine - git is distributed, only canonical
>     write-repo would be affected anything bad happen. But that isn't the case
>     for reviews, issues; as it has been discussed in the "let's migrate bugzilla
>     to github issues", it is far more involved.
>   * What about DMCA? Not sure how this is currently handled.
>   * UI feels laggy. Not much to add here, pretty subjective.
>   * I'm sure i'm missing a few.
>
> The github does come with it's benefits, sure:
> * It is *simpler* to preserve git commit author.
>   Currently one has to ask the author for the "Author: e at ma.il" line,
>   and do `git commit --amend --author="<>"`.
> * @mention is wide-r-reaching - whole github, not just llvm phabricator
> * No more "phabricator disk full" issues
> * ???
>
> TLDR: such migration lowers the bar for new, first time,
> unestabilished contributors, but i personally feel it *significantly*
> raises the bar for the existing contributors, reviewers.
> We don't live in perfect world. Aspirational goals are aspirational.
> They should be attempted to be reached, but they shouldn't shadow and
> overweight, take over the main goal of the LLVM project.
>
> Personally, i don't see that benefits out-/over- weight the drawbacks.
>
> Roman.
>
> On Thu, Nov 7, 2019 at 8:32 AM Mehdi AMINI via llvm-dev
> <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> >
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Now that we're on GitHub, we can discuss about pull-requests.
> > I'd like to propose to enable pull-request on GitHub, as a first step as an experimental channel alongside the existing methods for contributing to LLVM.
> > This would allow to find workflow issues and address them, and also LLVM contributors in general to start getting familiar with pull-requests without committing to switching to pull-requests immediately. The community should evaluate after a few months what would the next steps be.
> >
> > GitHub pull-requests is the natural way to contribute to project hosted on GitHub: this feature is so core to GitHub that there is no option to disable it!
> >
> > The current proposal is to allow to integrate contributions to the LLVM project directly from pull-requests. In particular the exact setup would be the following:
> >
> >   - Contributors should use their own fork and push a branch in their fork.
> >   - Reviews can be performed on GitHub. The canonical tools are still the mailing-list and Phabricator: a reviewer can request the review to move to Phabricator.
> >   - The only option available will be to “squash and merge”. This mode of review matches the closest our current workflow (both phabricator and mailing-list): conceptually independent contributions belongs to separate review threads, and thus separate pull-requests.
> > This also allow the round of reviews to not force-push the original branch and accumulate commits: this keeps the contextual history of comments and allow to visualize the incremental diff across revision of the pull-request.
> >   - Upon “merge” of a pull-request: history is linear and a single commit lands in master after review is completed.
> >
> > As an alternative staging proposal: we could enable pull-requests only for a small subset of sub-projects in LLVM (i.e. not LLVM/clang to begin with for example) in the repo. In this case, we would propose to begin with the MLIR project (as soon as it gets integrated in the monorepo). This would be a good candidate to be the guinea pig for this process since it does not yet have a wide established community of contributors, and the current contributors are already exclusively using pull-requests.
> >
> > Here is a more complete doc on the topic: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DSHQrfydSjoqU9zEnj3rIcds6YN59Jxc37MdiggOyaI
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > --
> > Mehdi
> >
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