On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 1:43 AM, Brion Vibber <brion(a)pobox.com> wrote:
substantially
broken, BECAUSE ***THEY'RE NOT USING IT*** FOR THINGS THAT ARE IMPORTANT TO
THEM.
That's not correct -- the same code review tools are being used to look over
and comment on those things, AND THEN THE DAMN THING ACTUALLY GETS MERGED TO
THE DEPLOYMENT BRANCH BY SOMEBODY AND PUSHED TO PRODUCTION BY SOMEBODY.
Alright, we've had fun with all caps for a while, so let's focus on
solutions now.
MZ says we need to move to a system with regular deployments, where
regular is more than monthly and ideally weekly or bi-weekly. I
completely agree with this, per the "spend a day per week or a week
per month" argument. The discussion then turns into conflating
releases and deployments, followed by some back and forth yelling
about deadlines and CR processes.
So let me sketch how I see us getting there.
1. Get 1.18 reviewed
2a. Get 1.18 deployed and released
2b. At the same time, continue efforts to have code review catch up
with SVN HEAD
3. Once we have reviewed everything up to HEAD (or up to a revision
less than a week older than HEAD), deploy it to Wikimedia
4. Keep reviewing so the CR backlog doesn't grow, and deploy HEAD
again in 1-2 weeks. Rinse and repeat.
There are a few caveats here, of course:
* 2a and 2b largely compete for the time of the same developers
* 3 (initial HEAD deployment) will probably be a bit hairy because
it's a lot of code the first time. After that it's only 1-2 weeks'
worth each time
* For 4, we need to figure out a way to make CR actually happen in a
regular and timely fashion
So a lot of it comes down to implementing a proper code review
process, both for the one-off catch-up sprint (to 1.18, then to HEAD;
we've done one of these before with 1.17) and for the day-to-day
keep-up work. I think we may also need to make it clearer that
reviewers (who, typically, are paid developers working on many other
things) need to spend one-fifth of their time (i.e. a day per week for
full-time employees) on code review. This is basically the "admins
aren't watching Special:Unreviewedpages at all" problem that
Happy-melon mentioned.
So mostly, I think our immediate problems are:
* no agreed-upon strategy to tackle the problem (what do y'all think
about mine?)
* not enough man-hours spent on keeping up with new commits
** ...presumably because employed people aren't given the time to work
on it and/or made to work on it
** ...and because some of our reviewers are college students working
part-time (fortunately I'll graduate soon and have more time :D)
Thoughts?
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)