Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Reflections on kernel development processes

[Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 11:08:04AM -0400, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Many of you attended Dmitry Vyukov's talk at the Kernel Summit track
> today, "Reflections on Kernel Development Process, Quality, and
> Testing".  (For those of you who haven't, the slides are available
> here[1].)
> 
> [1] https://linuxplumbersconf.org/event/4/contributions/554/attachments/353/584/Reflections__Kernel_Summit_2019.pdf
> 
> Greg K-H has suggested, and I strongly agree, that it would be
> worthwhile to add this to the agenda of the Maintainer's Summit.  In
> particular, what next steps should we take and what should be the
> criteria and the process for trying to further standardize our tools
> and processes in order to make make our development processes more
> mature and to improve developer productivity and happiness.
> 
> If you didn't attend the talk, I encourage you to take a look at the
> slide, so we don't have to spend time trying to bring people up to
> speed on the discussion to date.  My plan is to schedule this as our
> first topic tomorrow afternoon.

To follow-up, this is a very rough outline of a proposal that I am going
to submit to the Foundation in hopes to fund maintainer tool
development. It follows along some of the lines highlighted in Dmitry's
talk.

--------

# Stage 1 (Normal brain): "local patchwork"

- Implement a mutt-like tool ("putt"?) that uses locally cloned
  public-inbox archives to track patches/series submitted to mailing
  lists
    - Pre-filters by keywords and paths in patches
    - Tracks and automatically inserts taglines
      (Reviewed-by, Acked-by, Tested-by)
    - Can ignore a patch/series until it sees certain taglines
      (Tested-by: zeroday bot, Reviewed-by: Trusty Intern)
    - Automatically tracks latest series and offers an interdiff view
      between series revisions ("show me what changed between v1 and v2")
    - Allows responding to patches and conversations a-la mutt
    - Allows applying patches/series to local repos


# Stage 2 (Enlightened brain): "now with CI and workflows"

- Add configurable workflow functionality allowing maintainers to run
  local or remote tasks on patches and series, before maintainer sees
  the patches, e.g.:
    - Create a branch and attempt to apply series
    - If succeeds, run a batch of CI tests
    - If succeeds, mark as "CI passed" and show the maintainer
    - If fails, reject automatically using a "sorry, tests failed"
      template, including relevant error messages

- All of the above runs outside of the UI tool ("putt-cid"?) and defines CI
  routines that can run in cloudy environments or locally using
  containers.
- Putt communicates with putt-cid locally or remotely to identify
  patches/series that the maintainer should review


# Stage 3 (Galaxy brain): "email as a secondary channel"

- Support additional distributed communication mechanisms in conjunction
  with existing mailing lists.
  - SSB is a peer-to-peer replication framework that has built-in
    cryptographic integrity and attestation ("immutable git-like
    chains per participating developer")
    - offers native support for structured data like bug reports, CI
      results, code review comments, etc.
    - can easily support email-to-SSB and web-to-SSB bridges, so
      developers can choose to participate using familiar tools
    - has known limitations in v1 of the protocol, but v2 is being
      actively developed to address them.
    - or we can take it as a base and develop an SSB-like protocol that
      better suits distributed development needs.

  - Radicle is another interesting alternative that creates a mechanism
    for automating some maintainer tasks by defining "state machines,"
    e.g.:
    - automatically merge a revision if all tests pass and at least 2
      Reviewed-by's are seen.
    - May have been sipping the blockchain cool-aid a bit too much
      ("Immutable append-only records").
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