Using lei, b4, and mutt to do kernel development (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Using lei, b4, and mutt to do kernel development (2021)

josefbacik.github.io

92 pointscpach9 comments

> by instituting a GitHub based workflow to track patch status, but not everybody uses this.

The problem with using GitHub is that you are now at the whims of the US government[0]. If you have contributors in a sanctioned country they are not cut off from the project and their accounts. By pushing for GitHub you are signalling that you don't want free software, you only want "free for western countries" software

The nice thing about emails is that anyone can send an email. There is no third party account sign up needed.

> I used to configure mutt to use imap and connect to Gmail directly, but gmail has gone out of their way to make imap as shitty as possible

That's the other big problem is that gmail (hotmail too) just sucks for email. Personally I've switched to fastmail and have no issues with imap/isync/offlineimap.

---

0: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/29/github-ban-sanctioned-coun...

GitHub workflow != GitHub

Also, I think if you selfhost GitHub (Enterprise) I think your problem disappears also?

git bug uses github only as backend. And optionally.

Email workflow just lead to the same unpleasant experiences as with Linux, FreeBSD and similar dinosaurs

FreeBSD uses Phabricator and occasionally Github PRs for sharing and discussing patches, not email.

I find reviewing code on GitHub unpleasant. A lot of scrolling is required and it's difficult to find previously written comments and their responses. You can't really determine who is responding to whom if more than 2 people are involved.

None of those things are problems when reviewing code via email.

> If you have contributors in a sanctioned country they are not cut off from the project and their accounts. By pushing for GitHub you are signalling that you don't want free software, you only want "free for western countries" software

People affected by this could take up arms and rise against their dictatorships. Pushing them to do so is the entire point of sanctions.

In any case, the list of affected countries is pretty small anyway [1]: North Korea, Russia, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and Iran. NK'S population is locked out of anything anyway, nothing to be gained or lost from there, everyone who can has already fled Syria. We can debate if the sanctions on Cuba are worth it or not (and I lean towards the latter option), but Iran, Russia and Venezuela? Whatever needs to be done to push their population must be done, period.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_sanctions

You don't have to choose one or the other - you could say "please open a GitHub PR if you have an account, otherwise feel free to send an patch to patches@example.com". It might feel a little messy to 'mix and match' PRs and patches like this, but in practice, as long as everyone uses good commit messages I have found it to be inconsequential.

Except now you have to look in two different places instead of one.

I tried an email based dev workflow and it’s riddled with issues. Like the author mentioned, there’s just too much tinkering to get things to work right and then you have to set it up on every dev machine.

It forces the developer to adopt a bunch of tools they otherwise wouldn’t use. It’s also not conducive to being able to “edit” a patch without spamming everyone in the list.

This is all to say that I really do not like code review inside the browser either. I’m desperate to find something better. I looked into git-appraise but I’m worried about ide integration issues and a verbose cli

Reply on news.ycombinator.com