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

[m. allan noah]

I thought I'd reanimate this discussion to see if I could get a little
help. I've been working on SANE for many years, even before we used git.
I've been committing and pushing to master from the beginning. I pretty
much use the command line exclusively. I've never had a problem I could not
recover from. But, I'm not well versed in gitlab. So, I need a cheat sheet
for how you guys think changes should be committed now. Something simple
that an old unix graybeard can handle :)

thanks for your help-
allan

On Mon, Jan 3, 2022 at 4:29 PM Povilas Kanapickas <povilas at radix.lt> wrote:

> On 1/2/22 6:30 PM, Ralph Little wrote> 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.
>
> I finally understood. I was not thinking about the third option of not
> using merge requests, but just using separate branches, checking the CI
> results and merging via local git instance.
>
> > 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.
>
> Making sure the changes work via pushing branches and checking CI solves
> the issue of broken commits being pushed just like requiring merge
> requests.
>
> In addition to the above, requiring merge requests solve this:
>  - there's a place to conveniently comment about any change landing to
> the master branch far into the future
>  - the chance of accidental push to master is eliminated (happened to
> even to me, though on a different project)
>
> I don't know whether these are important points to convince you. Myself
> I only have slight preference for requiring merge requests and Wolfram
> indicated that he strongly supports it due to ability to do code reviews.
>
> Cheers,
> Povilas
>
>

-- 
"well, I stand up next to a mountain- and I chop it down with the edge of
my hand"
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