Re: gerrit - does it allow writing commits using a web interface?

[Graham Percival]

On Fri, Sep 07, 2012 at 11:07:19AM +0200, Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
> Can someone please explain me very slowly why we don't simply use
> Git as intended?
> 
> Have you noticed that git patches are already in e-mail form?  You could
> post them to lilypond devel!  Just comment and review in-line.

Because this empirically did not work in the past for us.

- few people reviewed patches
- patches get lost, especially from new contributors
- email-only patches don't offer the ability to see more context
  as required (I've occasionally looked at +-30 lines, rather than
  the 10 lines that rietveld shows by default, and certainly more
  than the 3 lines that diff -u shows)

The second point is absolutely key, IMO.  If somebody sends a
patch, receives no feedback for a week, sends a second patch, and
again receives no feedback for a week, they are very unlikely to
continue trying to help lilypond.  BTW, that's not a theoretical
example; it happened a few months ago.  (although in that case the
contributor was amazingly still willing to help lilypond!)

Being able to automatically keep track of patches is key.  I know
that the linux kernel mailing list does things differently, but
they can *afford* to turn away developers, i.e.
http://lwn.net/Articles/501670/
http://lwn.net/Articles/500443/
Quote from Linus from that second article: "Publicly making fun of
people is half the fun of open source programming."  For the linux
kernel, they can afford to alienate 90% of patch submitters and
they would *still* have more patches than they can comfortably
review.  But that won't work for LilyPond.

- Graham