Subject: [bug#76503] [GCD] Migrating repositories, issues, and patches to Codeberg

From: Ekaitz Zarraga <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2025 20:40:22 +0100

On 2025-03-04 19:55, Noé Lopez wrote:
> 
> Here’s my point of view:
> - clone the upstream repository
> - make commits
> - format patches
> - configure git send-mail
> - …or find out which addresses to send the mail and who to cc with
> etc/teams.scm
> - send email
> 

Of course, I was just making it simple on purpose. Those points you 
address here have "easy" answers (my point being: as "easy" as 
agit-flow, with quotes), once you configure, you don't have to type the 
email addresses anymore.

The point what I wanted to make is not that it is really easier or not 
(without quotes), but the fact that it doesn't matter. It's different to 
what people expect, and that's going to create friction.

> Which is more complicated than the AGit flow IMO.  And we will need
> documentation on how to contribute no matter which way we choose.

The heavy use of --push-option/-o is pretty weird for people that never 
did that before (I never used that before and I have quite a long 
experience collaborating in free software projects), the refspec usage 
agit-flow needs is not widely known either.

- Was it refs/for/master or was it /for-review/ or what?
- Oh the -o description="..." takes a string but I want a multiline 
thing that is getting too long.
- Oh no! the pr messed up my formatting again!
...

Well, at least the email we can write it in a proper editor very easily. 
I don't know if that's the case in the -o unless we hack around... 
(anyway, that's not the point here)

> What I especially like about the AGit flow is that it just uses git,
> which is a common factor. No need for an alternate patch format, or
> email.

Well, patches are a part of git as --push-option is (Codeberg PRs are 
not part of Guix, though), so I don't think this makes a good argument. 
But regardless, my point was that when this issue was discussed, for 
example, in a thread I started a while ago about the future of Guix, the 
arguments I found were that Guix was too hard on newcomers and that we 
needed to use a forge like any body else, because that's what people is 
used to.

I still doubt that applying the Github workflow (or any other workflow) 
is going to increase the amount of meaningful contributions (Guix is 
already too hard as it is, it's not like the email workflow was the 
hardest part of Guix) and I'm aware the move to Codeberg doesn't only 
try to fix the commit workflow but also many other things, which I agree 
with.

I just wanted to emphasize that if we are not letting people use the 
merge button and we are going to use agit-flow or anything like that, we 
are not going to make it obviously simple.

And it's going to make the committers' (our real bottleneck) life a 
little bit hard for some time until we get used to this and we become as 
efficient with it as we are now.

Cheers,
Ekaitz