Document GitLab as the only way to contribute to Samba?

[Uri Simchoni]

On 6/21/19 4:05 AM, Andrew Bartlett via samba-technical wrote:
> G'Day all,
> 
> I gave a talk at SambaXP about our first year with GitLab, and one
> point I made is that it is *not OK* to have public contribution
> documentation that does not match our actual practice.
> 
> I was talking about GitHub, which we advertised but did not embrace
> (and which by the end caused new contributors to be told off,
> essentially).
> 
> I've recently found myself doing the same thing!  But now I'm berating
> contributors who follow our public documentation and so innocently send
> patches to samba-technical, or attach them to bugzilla. 
> 
> So, I would like to propose this.  That given the practice of the Samba
> Team and almost all contributors is to contribute via a merge request
> against https://gitlab.com/samba-team/samba that we document this, and
> only this, as how to contribute to new patches to Samba.
> 
> This is only one tiny step in a process to have clear, practical
> contribution instructions, but I would like to ensure we agree on this
> much.
> 
> Essentially it would mean a better version of this being prominently
> placed:
> 
> https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba_CI_on_gitlab#Creating_a_merge_request
> 
> and updates to:
> https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Using_Git_for_Samba_Development
> 
> Non patch, meta and broader architectural discussions still belong on
> samba-technical of course. 
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 
> Andrew Bartlett
> 

Speaking for myself, this thread brought to my attention that Samba
development is no longer happening on samba-technical mailing list. I'm
all for gitlab, but had the notion that you post an MR *and* write to
samba-technical, which was certainly true 6 months ago. By moving to
Gitlab without proper notification you've lost me as a reviewer (and I
do make occasional reviews in places where I was involved). I'll take
the proper measures to get back on-board :)

So a clear statement *is* in order.

A bit off-topic, and maybe the following concern has been raised and
answered. My gitlab experience is a bit dated so maybe things have
changed, but it seems to me that the mailing-list style of review keeps
a better track of the decision process that led to the way the code is
(and I for one used the samba-technical mail archive more than once for
that purpose):
a. With online tools, a revised MR may trump the comments made by the
previous version.
b. How to find the MR from a commit hash to see those comments.
c. All this information (MR comments) is kept outside our control and
may not be available should we decide to move away from Gitlab as a
hosting platform.

Thanks,
Uri.