On Apr 3, 2025, Richard Stallman <r...@gnu.org> wrote: > [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] > [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] > [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>> Models 1. (pull from submitter's repo) and 2. (PR database with per-PR >> branches in project's own repo, or from submitter's repo) would be fine, >> but I don't suppose people inclined to prefer 3. (web-based >> outsourced-computing (SaaSS) interfaces) would like that. > I am surprised that you see a big difference in user appeal between 2 > and 3. To me it seems that model 2 could offer a web interface which > would look much like thatof model 3. So why would some people prefer > model 3 strongly? > Is there some detailed fact I am mussing? Does anyone here know? Consider the interaction patterns a maintainer goes through to merge such a PR: 2. - git clone the project's repository (presumably already done, it's a maintainer after all) - check out the target branch (possibly already done, same reason) - git pull to fetch the PR and merge it - review the changes - git push to the project's repository 3. - review the proposed changes - click on the "merge" button It's not hard to agree that 3. has a lot less friction. But that's because it outsources a large chunk of the processing to the server. The solution to that IMHO is to bring the PR into maintainers' machines. If the PR database were part of the git repository that maintainers fetched regularly, then a local program running on the maintainer's own machine could browse the PR (and bug) database, and merge PRs, with a single click as well. There would still be a challenge of pushing the merged changes up to the server, because other committers could have changed the branch concurrently, and that would require resyncing. -- Alexandre Oliva, happy hacker https://blog.lx.oliva.nom.br/ Free Software Activist FSFLA co-founder GNU Toolchain Engineer Learn the truth about Richard Stallman at https://stallmansupport.org/
