RFC: rel-eng tooling development workflow

[Adam Miller]

Hello all,
    It's recently become somewhat of a recurring theme in the
#fedora-releng channel to discuss the Fedora rel-eng tooling
development workflow, changes that would like to be seen, and
decisions on tools/infra to deliver them. I thought I'd shoot out an
email to the list to kick off the conversation in a more formal manner
with an initial proposal for feedback.

I'm personally a fan of what I'll simply refer to as "the GitHub
workflow" by virtue of it's rise in popularity but it boils down to
effectively this:

  1) Upstream project has a 'master' or 'devel' branch were dev happens
  2) Developers fork the repository
  3) Developers create "topic branches" (a branch for a specific dev
feature/fix)
  4) Developer then send a pull request to 'master' or 'devel' for code review
  5) Once reviewed and signed off on it is approved and merged

Now a couple things to note:
    First and foremost is that this is by no means the only workflow
but just one that has become increasingly popular that I'm a fan of.
However, I'm certainly open to other suggestions and opinions but for
the sake of my initial proposal and the rest of this email I'll be
continuing on with this workflow in mind.
    Secondly, it has been brought up that the Fedora Rel-Eng team at
large does not want to use GitHub because it is non-free software and
I'm on board with that.

With that second note in mind, there are a decent handful of open
source solutions for this and of those there are two "front runners"
in my mind for our use since they are written in python and the Fedora
team at large has plenty of experience developing and
hosting/deploying/administering software written in python. They are:

- pagure (http://pagure.dev.fedoraproject.org/)
    This has been written by Fedora's very own pingou and it satisfies
all immediate requirements that I know of (including FAS account
integration) and would offer the ability for us to fine-tune it for
our needs since it's effectively been developed "in house" but we
could also work to make it more popular in the broader community so
see if others would like to join and help add even more features to
it.

- kallithea (https://kallithea-scm.org/)
    This project has been growing interest and to the best of my
knowledge is that it's slated towards being used officially by
upstream CPython developers at python.org, however some have mentioned
in #fedora-releng that there are missing features that we'd need/want
so this might require a bit of initial heavy lifting to add upstream.
(also no current support for FAS integration)

Alright, with all that said. I'd like to kind of round this back to a
set of requirements for the group in terms of the new workflow and
tooling:

I think everyone agrees that we need:
1) Code Review
2) Easy viewing/reference of code review history
3) Accountability for 1 & 2

If there are others, or things I have left out please let me know.

OK, that's it! If you made it this far, I owe you a cookie or something.

Please provide feedback, questions, and general snide remarks.

Thank you,
-AdamM