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

[Ralph Little]

On 2022-01-02 3:14 a.m., Povilas Kanapickas wrote:
> On 1/2/22 5:07 AM, Ralph Little wrote:
>>>> Personally, I always make changes to branches. I don't believe that
>>>> there should be functional changes direct to master, even for small
>>>> corrections.
>>>> I don't know if I would necessarily go all the way to require MRs for
>>>> every change but I am open to be convinced.
>>> I'm not sure I understood correctly, so instead of guessing, let's
>>> double check :) Are you not convinced that we should add a rule in
>>> GitLab that forbids direct pushes or are you against general policy?
>> I don't think we should permit direct commits to master as a rule,
>> enforced either by policy or by some mechanism (if such a thing exists)
> Gitlab allows adding a per-branch rule that has 3 settings:
>   - Allowed to merge (Developers+Maintainers / Maintainers / No one / A
> specific set of users)
>   - Allowed to push (Developers+Maintainers / Maintainers / No one / A
> specific set of users)
>   - Allowed to force push (Yes/No)
>
> So for example we could configure the following for master branch:
>
>   - Allowed to merge = Developers+Maintainers
>   - Allowed to push = No one (this would be relaxed to Maintainers for
> the release commit)
>   - Allowed to force push = No
>
> Myself I slightly prefer the above strict rule because pushes of wrong
> branch to wrong remote happen to everyone. An agreement would work fine too.
>
>> I'm not sure about requiring MRs for all branches though but I am open
>> to persuasion.
>> I think that was my point.
> I'm still not sure I understand :-) Are you talking about requiring a MR
> from any arbitrary branch abc to another branch xyz? Or about requiring
> a MR from any arbitrary branch abc to "master" branch? Could you please
> explain like I'm five with a couple examples?
>
I guess my point is that I don't really care much about requiring Merge 
Requests for any changes to the repo as much as I care about not pushing 
changes directly to master without branching and merging (and benefiting 
from our pipeline checks).
It is too easy to break master by a careless single push.

Referring to your original proposition:

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

... I am open to discussion certainly and I can see the advantages.

Cheers,
Ralph