[sane-devel] Requiring GitLab merge requests for all changes

[Povilas Kanapickas]

Hello,

What do you think about requiring merge requests for all incoming
changes on the sane-backends repository?

This mostly doesn't change the current process because the majority of
changes land to master via merge requests already. If the developer does
not think a true review is necessary then he can merge the new merge
request himself as soon as CI completes which currently introduces a
delay of around 15 minutes.

Out of 20 direct pushes to master since 1.0.32 we still managed to break
master once (twice, if we count a MR merge without waiting for CI). This
is important because any build failure will cause bisecting harder for
unrelated backends.

Lastly, merge requests provide a place for discussions even after a
merge request is merged (e.g. if issues have been caused). Filing issue
is not equivalent because there is no code review UI there.

I can only think a single reasonable exception for the above policy: the
push of the commit announcing a new release. With merge request we would
need to create the release tag on a merge commit which is confusing.

Please let me know what you think.

Regards,
Povilas