Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 4:34 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Having a plan is great and it sounds like a completely reasonable plan, but currently only Tim is able to do general code updates and he's not really around, from what I understand.
I don't think anyone is treating Tim as necessary for code updates right now. There are plenty of people with the privileges to do it, and it's not especially complicated or hard. It will require a considerable amount of planning for such a huge backlog, to do things like work out all the schema updates and have enough people on hand to quickly handle all the inevitable regressions that will arise. But I don't think any particular single person needs to be the one to do it.
I don't see any evidence to support what you're saying. For the past half-decade or so, there have only been two people doing general code updates: Tim and Brion. Both are now out of commission, from what I understand. We've both noted that others have the technical ability to do general code updates, but I don't believe that anyone else has (or has the social ability to do so).
To put it another way, if the code backlog were eliminated today, I think the exact same frustrations and annoyances would exist among the developer community because the code would sit reviewed, but un-deployed. When we say "the biggest issue is a huge code review backlog," it's misleading. The reality is that the biggest issue is a huge code review _and deployment_ backlog.
I'm not going to knock anyone for focusing on half the problem (review), but that doesn't make the other half (deployment) resolve itself.
Broadly, I don't see any reason why it's beneficial to engage in Great Reveal-style code updates to the site. There are thousands of uncontroversial revisions already reviewed that could be deployed today. Waiting for more revisions to build up makes diagnosing and finding problems more difficult (same size needle, larger haystack). You know this and I know this, which is why I'm trying to pivot the conversation toward what I view as the bigger question: who's going to be doing general code updates in the future? And subsequent to that, is there any reason to hold off on deploying incrementally?
MZMcBride