Roan Kattouw wrote:
2010/10/16 Alex mrzmanwiki@gmail.com:
Why does this need some elaborate plan that will take multiple months to implement? The infrastructure for actually doing code review is already there; it just needs someone to actually do it.
I didn't mean to suggest an elaborate plan needs to be concocted, nor that /implementing/ it would take months. Executing it most probably would, though. By way of example, my "plan" is give below. It's mostly obvious stuff, but I see how people might disagree on the order or timing of things, which is why I think there should be (some) discussion before settling down on something. I didn't really want to put this in this thread because I think that discussion deserves its own, but here it is anyway:
- Catch up with the code review backlog (about 1,200 revs currently).
I expect this to be entirely uncontroversial, and this can be (and is being) done while we argue about the rest 2. When trunk is fully reviewed and we feel it's probably stable, release 1.17.0beta1 and deploy it on Wikimedia 3. Fix the numerous bugs that will inevitably rear their ugly heads when 8 months' (or more) worth of code is deployed 4. Once deployment stabilizes, rebranch from trunk (picking up trunk changes since the last deployment that weren't specifically aimed at fixing the site), release and deploy that. 5. Repeat 2-4 until we feel comfortable releasing the currently deployed code as 1.17.0 6. From there on out, do weekly deployments of trunk
This sounds fine. I don't think anyone would have a problem with this.
The question becomes: how is this plan going to be implemented? Right now, from my perspective, there's a huge single point of failure in code deployment. Namely, that only one person is able to do it for regular, general code updates (that is, others have the technical ability to do updates, but only for specific revisions and under specific circumstances).
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. And even when he is around, there's more code than there is time and other resources. This makes backlogs like the current one completely inevitable. There are a few solutions to this problem; can one of them be implemented?
MZMcBride
P.S. Congrats on your blog fame, or something. :-)