[lustre-devel] [LSF/MM/BPF TOPIC] [DRAFT] Lustre client upstreaming

[NeilBrown]

On Mon, 20 Jan 2025, Oleg Drokin wrote:
> On Sun, 2025-01-19 at 09:48 +1100, NeilBrown wrote:
> > 
> > Once the transition completes there will still be process
> > difficulties,
> > but there are plenty of of process difficulties now (gerrit: how do I
> > hate thee, let me count the ways...) but people seem to simply
> > include
> > that in the cost of doing business.
> 
> it's been awhile since I did patch reviews by emails, but I think
> gerrit is much more user-friendly (if you have internet, anyway)

I guess it isn't exactly the gerrit interface but more the workflow that
it encourages, or at least enables.
The current workflow seems to be "patch at a time" rather than "patchset
at a time".
The fact that you cherry-pick patches into master is completely
different to how most (all?) of the upstream community works.  It means
that whole series isn't visible in the final git tree so we lose
context.  And it seems to mean that a long series takes a loooooong time
to land as it dribbles in to master.

I would MUCH rather that a whole series was accepted or rejected as a
whole - and was merged rather than cherry-picked to keep commit ids
stable.
There are times when I would like the first few patches of a series to
land earlier, but that should be up to the submitter to split the
series. 

And the automatic testing is a real pane.  Certainly it is valuable but
it has a real cost too.  The false positives are a major pane.  I would
rather any test that wasn't reliable were disabled (of fixed) as a
priority.  Or at least made non-fatal.
Also, it would be much nicer if the last in a series were tested first
and if that failed then don't wasted resources testing all the others.
Bonus points for a "bisect" to find where the failure starts, but that
can be up to the develop to explicitly request testing at some points in
the series.

NeilBrown