Daniel Bensoussan <danielbensoussanbohm@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > +TRIANGULAR WORKFLOW > +------------------- > + > +Introduction > +~~~~~~~~~~~~ > + > +In some projects, contributors cannot push directly to the project but > +have to suggest their commits to the maintainer (e.g. pull requests). > +For these projects, it's common to use what's called a *triangular > +workflow*: > + ... > +Motivations > +~~~~~~~~~~~ > + > +* Allows contributors to work with Git even if they don't have > +write access to **UPSTREAM**. > + > +Indeed, in a centralized workflow, a contributor without write access > +could write some code but could not send it by itself. The contributor > +was forced to create a mail which shows the difference between the > +new and the old code, and then send it to a maintainer to commit > +and push it. This isn't convenient at all, neither for the > +contributor, neither for the maintainer. With the triangular > +workflow, the contributors have the write access on **PUBLISH** > +so they don't have to pass upon maintainer(s). And only the > +maintainer(s) can push from **PUBLISH** to **UPSTREAM**. > +This is called a distributed workflow (See "DISTRIBUTED WORKFLOWS" > +above). I probably should not be judging if these additions to gitworkflows.txt is a good idea in the first place without seeing any explanation as to why this patch is here, but I think it misses the place where "triangular" sits in a larger picture. The workflow to contrast against to illustrate the motivation is a centralized workflow, where everybody pushes their updates to a single place. It does have problems inherent to its structure (e.g. "review before integration" is much harder, if possible), and also has its merits (e.g. it is simpler to explain and reason about). If you want to wean a project off of the centralized model, you'd need to use the "distributed workflow". The workflow to review and apply mailed patches in public, and the workflow to have the project pull from many publish repositories individual contributor has, are two that allows the project to go distributed. These two are complementary choices with pros and cons, and it is not like one is an improvement of the other. Projects like the kernel even uses hybrid of the two---the patches are reviewed in public at central places (i.e. subsystem mailing lists) in an e-mail form and go through iterations getting polished, and the polished results are collected by (sub)maintainers and sent upwards, either as a request to pull from publish repositories maintained by (sub)maintainers, or relayed again in e-mail form (the last mile being e-mail primarily serves as a transport vehicle for changes proven to be good, not as material to be further reviewed). The reason why projects make these choices is because there are pros and cons. A large collection of changes is far easier to integrate with one command (i.e. "git pull") and with a need to resolve merge conflicts just once, than applying many small changes as e-mailed patches, having to resolve many conflicts along the way. In order to ensure quality of the individual changes, however, the changes need to be reviewed and polished, and the reality of the life is that there are far fewer people who are qualified to adequately review and help polishing the changes than those who make changes. Asking reviewers to go to different repositories (whose number scales with the number of contributors) and leave comments in the webforms is much less efficient and more costly for the project overall, than asking them to subscribe to relevant mailing lists (whose number scales only with the number of areas of interest) and conduct reviews there. Other factors like "offline access" also count when considering the two models as "choices". As long as the document uses phrases like "forced to", "isn't convenient at all", etc., it is clear that it starts from a wrong premise, "one is an improvement over the other".
