[ovirt-devel] VDSM review & development tools

[Martin Polednik]

Hello developers,

this e-mail is mostly aimed at VDSM contributors (current and
potential) and should serve as continuation of the idea started at our
weekly meeting.

We've had a proposal of moving the project to github[1] and using
reviewable[2] as a code review due to github's code review interface.

I would like to start a *discussion* regarding how we would like to
develop VDSM in future. So far, the suggested options were (1st
implied):

1) gerrit (stay as we are),
2) github & reviewable,
3) mailing list.

What would be your favorite review & development tool and why? Do you
hate any of them? Let the flamewar^Wconstructive discussion begin! :)


<subjective part>
My preferred tool is mailing list with the main tree mirrored to
github. Why mailing list in 2016 (almost 2017)?

a) stack - We're built on top of libvirt, libvirt is
built on top of qemu and qemu utilizes kvm which is a kernel module.
Each of this projects uses mailing lists for development.

b) tooling - Everyone is free to use tools of choice. Any sane e-mail
client can handle mailing list patches, and it's up to reviewers to
choose the best way to handle the review. As for sending the patches,
there is the universal fallback in the form of git-send-email.

c) freedom - It's up to us to decide how would we handle such
development. As many system-level projects already use mailing lists
(see a), there is enough inspiration for workflow design[3].

d) accessibility - VDSM is in unfortunate position between "cool",
high level projects and "boring" low level projects. I believe that we
should be more accessible to the developers from below the stack
rather than to general public. Having unified workflow that doesn't
require additional accounts and is compatible with their workflows
makes that easier.
</subjective part>


[1] https://github.com/
[2] https://reviewable.io/
[3] e.g. https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/SubmittingPatches

Regards,
mpolednik