Go accepts patches from GitHub pull requests now | Hacker News Reader

Go accepts patches from GitHub pull requests now

github.com

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To summarize:

We now mirror GitHub PRs into Gerrit. Gerrit is still our upstream Git server. Gerrit is still where we do reviews and press the "Merge" button. (And once merged, it gets mirrored back to GitHub)

But now we have a bot that slurps PRs into Gerrit and syncs comments back and forth and closes PRs when needed. (We'll do more fine-grained comment sync in the future. We just shipped an "MVP" for the Go 1.11 tree opening).

Some more information is at https://golang.org/wiki/GerritBot

Code is at https://github.com/golang/build/blob/master/cmd/gerritbot/ge...

This is smart, decreasing the hurdles to contributions will inevitably result in more contributions. Economics 101. And I don't think it necessarily follows that they will be lower quality either, maybe for first time contributors, but we all start at the same place and have to learn. More first time contributors will also lead to more repeat contributors.

Any time I come across a project that uses Gerrit I immediately abandon any proposed patches I had planned to submit. Gerrit is terrible for actually working with and is unfriendly even to experienced git users. I have to battle with Gerrit to submit patches to MediaWiki and it is a painful process every time.

Clarifying that I believe that my personal off work time is valuable to myself. The more time and friction I have to spend putting in a pull request/code review is the less time I get to myself.

I don't understand your point of view at all. Gerrit has such a good work flow and ui. It's probably in the top 5 best tools I have ever used. Github's pull request model is like a child's toy in comparison.

Serious question, what are other best ones?

I really enjoyed ReviewBoard when I used it but we built up a lot of tooling around it to actually make it useful & integrate into git.

I like https://reviewable.io, low friction github integration but gerrit-like multi-patchsets and generally a sane flow when you have multiple rounds of comments

Gerrit has a good UI? Heh, that's a good one. Git's CLI is like 10x superior to Gerrit's interface, and that's even counting the fact that git checkout does like 2 or 3 different things.

I've basically given up on fighting with the WMF's Gerrit install and outsource the work to other people. I push a commit up to a github repository, open a task, and ask another developer to grab my commit from a new git remote. I want to write code, not wrangle with whatever Gerrit wants me to do to submit code. And then look for tiny links on a cluttered page. No thanks.

I'm assuming you're talking about the reviewer and long term contributor side of it. personally I found initial setup as a drive-by contributor to be very tedious. GitHub is the lowest friction because I already have an account with SSH key etc.

What is your opinion on just using a pure mailing list workflow (like what's done for git itself)?

I know there are a lot of code review tools, but with GITHUB and all the tools they make available, I wonder why the other code-review tools are still being developed/maintained.

I wonder that too. Even competing code review tools are very similar.

> GITHUB

Off-topic, but I'm genuinely curious why you chose this capitalization?

My wife often types complete messages in caps. I asked her why she was shouting, and she told me she doesn't consider it shouting at all. To her there's no difference between typing in small letters and all caps.

I see this fairly often that somehow a group of users collectively decides that a certain name has to be typed in all-caps. Whenever someone asks me a question about SWIFT, I tell them I have no idea about fintech, but I can instead answer any questions they have about Swift. But it's an uphill battle.

(OpenStack Swift, that is, not Apple Swift. And not Suzuki Swift either.)

My favorite is when people capitalize LISP. It's not 1958 anymore, we can just say Lisp now.

No reason really.. Probably unconciouslly highlighted GITHUB :)

Other tools are developed and maintained to stimulate competition and avoid vendor lock-in. Monocultures are dangerous.

One example of a use-case where GitHub falls short is offline support: you can't take the issue tracker and wiki with you. There are alternative tools such as fossil [0] which have built-in bug tracking and wiki, which is an attractive feature for some people.

[0] https://fossil-scm.org/

I think you're right about the issue tracker, but the wiki is just another git repo [1] that you can checkout, commit and push.

[1] https://help.github.com/articles/adding-and-editing-wiki-pag...

Thanks for sharing. I wasn't aware this feature was available on GitHub.

I like fossil because it's all built-in and can be wrapped up in a single file. But it's always great to have more choices available.

Yeah.. this is one thing I recently discovered. I use github for my personal projects, and was going to start using the issue tracker to keep track of the bugs. But then I realized that if I do that if I do start tracking bugs on github, I will pretty much be tied to github.

Hopefully gitlab or bitbucket comes up with a solution which enables the owners of the repos to move bugs/issue tracking, which will force github to enable this feature as well.

You can actually access a mirror of Go’s issue tracker (hosted on GitHub) offline by using a tool [0]. Of course, a lot of code was written to make it possible, and it’s a read-only view.

[0] https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/build/maintner/cmd/maintserve

I agree 100% that monocultures are dangerous. But too much fragmentation is also harmful.

For example, now we have github, gitlab, mercuirial(bitbucket).. I only use the above 3.. but I am sure I can come up with 100 different github/gitlab type companies.

When there is so much fragmentation, it becomes difficult to find project or code reliably. For example, I have seen certain projects on bitbucket, which are awesome (say `ProjectA`) and create a lot of value. But there exists a very similar but differnt project `ProjectB` on github. Probably the author of `ProjectB` had the same problem that the author of `ProjectA` had, but couldnt discover that `ProjectA` already exists.

What open-source software enables you to do is to reuse software, however, if we create so many distinct places where the code resides, it becomes harder and harder to discover that code. Which leads to recreating codebases over and over again.

thanks for pointing out fossil by the way..

See the comment on the same thread https://github.com/golang/go/issues/18517#issuecomment-27051...

I've used both and I much prefer Gerrit over Github. I like the multiple patchset workflow, I don't have to deal with fork/opening a PR and I can actually do dependent reviews in Gerrit (if someone knows how to do this in Github, let me know!). I find Github has "too many steps".

Honestly, I am the same way. Any project that users gerrit for some reasons takes 10x+ time to merge issues or communicate, and the usability is terrible.

I now just avoid it whenever possible, usually forking my own thing, and just doing what I need.

No it does not. This is a myth that is always used by people who want to move to GitHub for other actual reasons that they cannot say in public.

I have first hand information from two projects (one of them large) that contribution, apart from drive-by doc fixes, does not increase.

Meaningful contribution decreases, because existing devs leave or become inactive because of GitHub.

A lot of projects moving to GitHub are in the Gervais-principle stage.

The problem I see with Github is the fact that it encourages contributors to commit repeated fixes to a pull request, rather than amending/rebasing the patch set. The other problem that Github has is that it doesn't provide a way to get interdiffs between patchset revisions. That is, if I open a pull request, get some comments, address those comments and rebase my changes in, then there's no way for the reviewer(s) to see what I actually changed.

This obviously increases contributions, which is great. Does this now require more time from people with Run Trybot access to manually kick off a CI run? I wondered why Go always used that instead of automatically kicking off CI for each patchset. To save resources perhaps?

At its heart, I am not certain the increased contributions are always good. There is a lot of theory written about how to build and grow out languages, and most of it seems to indicate that there needs to be a strong, central group of people with veto power. So long as the Go internal team retains this power, it's good, but having a community driving development for itself outside of the core language team often leads to (a) too many cooks in the kitchen and (b) adding features vocal fans want that nobody else cares about.

Go does have a strong, central group and in my (admittedly little) experience, they're very helpful too. But I'm just curious how the Go team scales with code reviews since this move will certainly bring in an influx of new contributors/PRs.

> To save resources perhaps?

For security, mostly. Our isolation is good but not perfect.

We could probably do a smaller set of (secure) builders for all patches, but it hasn't been a priority.

Given that one of the reasons GitHub is so popular is that it's a common toolchain, I wonder if it is indeed obvious that replacing the code-review tool with a different one (not to mention one that is often considered much less intuitive, if not usable) will result in more contributions. I hope the Go team posts some results in a few months.

This is an excellent change. While Gerrit is undoubtedly more powerful than GitHub's PR, GitHub is easy and familiar. I've found a fair number of small fixes and changes I've wanted to make to Gerrit projects but just abandoned due to not being inline with my current workflow. Now, I'll submit a PR and figure out the rest later. Hopefully, code review still being through Gerrit doesn't mean more stale PRs to deal with though. I guess time will tell...

It seems odd to me that Golang treats Github as a first class citizen for package management, yet a second class citizen for core contributions.

I'm really only a dabbler in Golang, so would appreciate any context.

For instance I was affected by the recent go-bindata owner change[1]. The Github user deleted their account and some random user reregistered the original user's name and recreated the repo (albeit seemingly innocently to help everyone get their CIs running again).

Actually while we're on the subject, Golang's whole package management experience is surprisingly disappointing :/

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/7vv9zz/popular_lib_...

Go does not treat Github any differently than any other VCS provider when it comes to package management.

OG gophers vendor their deps into their repo and avoid creating dependencies on 3rd party code whenever possible. The Go stdlib is very full featured so it is not unrealistic.

The problem with the go-bindata could be avoided by always vendoring/forking your deps and never trust any VCS provider (e.g. GitHub, Bitbucket, source forge) to handle your critical dependency needs.

Go does have special handling for Github: https://github.com/golang/go/blob/816154b06553a4cf8ee7ad089f....

Except that that link also shows special handling for 5 other VCS hosts, and you can have your own website given the same special handling by putting meta tags in the html. Github is not given special handling that no other VCS host is allowed.

Take a look at the dep[1] tool. It allows you to ship your project with all of its dependencies included. This means that only your source is needed to build your application/package.

The Gopkg.toml/Gopkg.lock files in dep are quite similar to Rust's Cargo.toml/Cargo.lock files. I think it's a good move as Rust has probably the best package management story out there.

Also, as the other comment mentioned, github.com is not "special" in any way. Any website with a git repo will work just as well. In fact, some key libraries are served from golang.org/x/<whatever>[2] not github.com.

[1]https://github.com/golang/dep [2]https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/SubRepositories

If you need an internet connection to complete any part of your build you are doing it wrong.

Anyone who vendored, or at worst kept a local copies of their dependencies littered all over their machine somewhere would have been fine.

I'm still putting off contributions because the CLA signing mechanism asked me for my phone number.

Slightly off topic, but would anyone have a similar solution/experience to sync between GitHub and Gitlab? (community version, not EE, since this is for a Free Software project)

Mirroring is an Enterprise Edition feature but there are probably ways to hack around that.

Great to see the high-friction barriers falling. The move to Github for issues has been a massive improvement.

Hopefully they can do something about getting rid of Google groups now. It's an extraordinarily poor organ of record. The low-friction Github issue tracker is full to bursting with high-ranking results for things that amount to support requests, but the pat response is a slightly-too-curt "ask this on golang-nuts, closed, kthxbye", and that's where the trail ends.

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/23745

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