On 02/04/2026 07:50, Claudio Bantaloukas via Gcc wrote:
Hi folks,
I've thought about Joseph's proposal to send all discussion happening on
forge to the mailing list*, specifically which bot workflows would need
to be implemented and what should happen at what time and here's a
slightly specific description that I plan to implement soon. I'm posting
this to get feedback as.
I wrote a first stab of the code implementing this workflow. The patch
is here: https://forge.sourceware.org/forge/batrachomyomachia/pulls/36
I use a throwaway forgejo instance in a devcontainer to do manual
testing and posted an example of emails to the test-list.
Check out the thread in inbox.
https://inbox.sourceware.org/test-list/[email protected]/t/#m8e5c8775901ffb3444ba947a0ce94425c75f515d
I plan on improving locking a bit and will deploy this to the
forge-stage vm sometime later this week or next week. After I deploy,
you'll see a whole lot of emails for the 147 pull requests in
https://forge.sourceware.org/gcc/gcc-TEST/pulls
This would be a great time to bikeshed over the format of the emails! :)
One thing that would be nice to have is posting patch reviews pointing
at code fragments as replies to a specific patch email rather the cover
letter.
I'm aware of this limitation but it looks too time consuming to
implement at this point in time and the patch is already quite big. For
the purposes of archiving discussion, I think it makes little difference.
Cheers,
Claudio
- A "PR rollup" means:
- if the user has force pushed a new version of the patch series, a
PR version is created
- if the current PR version has not been posted to the mailing list
yet, an up to date email patch series is sent
- messages related to the PR are sent as replies to the cover letter
of the latest patch series
- this includes all comments and reviews
- this includes requests to review
- excluding those that were already sent to the mailing list as
emails (the list is tracked on a database table)
- one message per comment or review
- Messages that must not be sent to the mailing list:
- all messages by the batrachomyomachia bot
- messages by the linaro bot (that do not include a <!-- bmm:send -->
tag in the comment, which is a convention we can ask the linaro bot to
adopt for comments that are meant to be sent to the mailing list)
- comments that include a <!-- bmm:nosend --> tag, which is a
convention to allow users to explicitly exclude certain comments from
being sent to the mailing list
- comments that contain the /submit or /preview command, since they
are meant to trigger an email rather than be included in the email
themselves
I think it will be enough to implement the following workflows in
batrachomyomachia:
- when a PR is opened
- no email is sent
- user gets a welcome comment with guidance on how to use the bot and
the available commands (a shorter version than what we currently have!)
- when someone requests a review on a PR by setting the Reviewers list
- "PR rollup" occurs
- when someone requests a review on a PR by writing a /submit comment
- "PR rollup" occurs
- when someone posts a review on a PR (hits the Finish review button and
completes a review, with any review state)
- "PR rollup" occurs
- When someone writes a comment that is not filtered by the rules above
- if a patch email has already been sent for the PR, an email is sent
to the mailing list with the content of the comment, with In-Reply-To
set to the message id of the last cover letter, so that it is grouped in
the same thread.
Note that this is not PR rollup (random comments don't create a new
PR version and patch posting)
- if no patch email has been sent for the PR, no email is sent to
avoid sending messages that are not linked to a patch series. These
comments will be included in the email when a patch series is eventually
sent.
- when a PR is closed without being merged and no patch email has been
sent and no messages would be sent
- no email is sent as no interaction happened
- when a PR is closed without being merged and at least one patch email
has been sent or at least one message would be sent
- a single email is sent to the mailing list notifying about the
closure, with In-Reply-To set to the message id of the last cover letter
- the email includes all comments and reviews in sequence
I think this strikes a balance between wanting to keep the mailing list
up to date with what's happening and overwhelming it with too many emails.
One thing to add: the linaro bot currently updates existing comments so
it will be good to figure out which messages are a "final state" and
either make the bot recognize them or mark them with <!-- bmm:send -->.
* https://forge.sourceware.org/forge/batrachomyomachia/issues/15
Cheers
Claudio
