Gitlab and Sign-Off trailers

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Fri, 2020-05-08 at 23:46 +1200, Andrew Bartlett via samba-technical
wrote:
> On Tue, 2020-05-05 at 17:41 +0200, Andreas Schneider via samba-
> technical wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I've looked into different solutions for checking sign-off
> > trailers:
> > 
> > 
https://gitlab.com/libssh/libssh-mirror/-/merge_requests/104/commits
> > 
> > I've found one working solution so far.
> 
> Thanks for looking into this.

Again, thank-you.  It is annoying to chase up contributors for a
Signed-off-by long after they have lost interest, when we could
otherwise accept their patch.

> We should also use the merge request checklist feature (as seen on
> GnuTLS), in particular to make new contributors consider that they
> need
> to up the 1h timeout on their private forks.

I looked into this.  

That feature is on GitLab.com, but not in their Open Source community
edition.  If we are happy to use (as we frankly do by accident
regardless, like the approval thing) that feature, we could add such a
checklist.

> But while I don't want to block this, we really need to pair it with
> a
> single, really good "Contribute" page on the wiki, with a single set
> of
> clear top-to-bottom instructions on how to make a great merge
> request,
> including Signed-off-by, DCO, patch style (mostly the clean, no
> reverts) and pointers to our other stuff like coding style.

I said I didn't want to block this, but clearly this was needed, so we
now have a much better Contibute page in the wiki:

https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Contribute

How can we progress this?

On the actual tool, my only thought is that currently some developers
don't sign their commits until they are finished, but still use the CI
extensively.  

We might want to clarify what Signed-off-by means for Samba, separating
the 'this patch is finished' from 'this patch is legit to submit or
base a better patch on' so those work in progress trees don't just
instantly fail CI (without manual pipeline runs).

(We could encourage a prefix of WIP/TODO for the legitimately my code
but not ready yet status).

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                       https://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team  https://samba.org
Samba Developer, Catalyst IT          
https://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba