commitfest.postgresql.org is no longer fit for purpose
От | Robert Haas |
---|---|
Тема | commitfest.postgresql.org is no longer fit for purpose |
Дата | |
Msg-id | CA+TgmobnTcNq1xQE_+jxBEtj+AjKg0r_p5YNFHDE+EDnpcpFxA@mail.gmail.com обсуждение исходный текст |
Ответы |
Re: commitfest.postgresql.org is no longer fit for purpose
(Erik Rijkers <er@xs4all.nl>)
Re: commitfest.postgresql.org is no longer fit for purpose ("David G. Johnston" <david.g.johnston@gmail.com>) Re: commitfest.postgresql.org is no longer fit for purpose (Maciek Sakrejda <m.sakrejda@gmail.com>) Re: commitfest.postgresql.org is no longer fit for purpose (Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se>) Re: commitfest.postgresql.org is no longer fit for purpose (Melanie Plageman <melanieplageman@gmail.com>) Re: commitfest.postgresql.org is no longer fit for purpose ("Andrey M. Borodin" <x4mmm@yandex-team.ru>) Re: commitfest.postgresql.org is no longer fit for purpose (Dmitry Dolgov <9erthalion6@gmail.com>) |
Список | pgsql-hackers |
Hi, The original intent of CommitFests, and of commitfest.postgresql.org by extension, was to provide a place where patches could be registered to indicate that they needed to be reviewed, thus enabling patch authors and patch reviewers to find each other in a reasonably efficient way. I don't think it's working any more. I spent a good deal of time going through the CommitFest this week, and I didn't get through a very large percentage of it, and what I found is that the status of the patches registered there is often much messier than can be captured by a simple "Needs Review" or "Waiting on Author," and the number of patches that are actually in need of review is not all that large. For example, there are: - patches parked there by a committer who will almost certainly do something about them after we branch - patches parked there by a committer who probably won't do something about them after we branch, but maybe they will, or maybe somebody else will, and anyway this way we at least run CI - patches parked there by a committer who may well do something about them before we even branch, because they're not actually subject to the feature freeze - patches that we've said we don't want but the author thinks we do (sometimes i agree with the author, sometimes not) - patches that have long-unresolved difficulties which the author either doesn't know how to solve or is in no hurry to solve - patches that have already been reviewed by multiple people, often including several committers, and which have been updated multiple times, but for one reason or another, not committed - patches that actually do need to be reviewed What's a bit depressing is that this last category is a relatively small percentage of the total. If you'd like to sit down and review a bunch of patches, you'll probably spend AT LEAST as much time trying to identify which CommitFest entries are worth your time as you will actually reviewing. I suspect you could easily spend 2 or 3 times as much time finding things to review as actually reviewing them, honestly. And the chances that you're going to find the things to review that most need your attention are pretty much nil. You could happen just by chance to discover a patch that was worth weeks of your time to review, but you could also miss that patch forever amidst all the clutter. I think there are a couple of things that have led to this state of affairs. First, we got tired of making people mad by booting their stuff out of the CommitFest, so we mostly just stopped doing it, even if it had 0% chance of being committed this CommitFest, and really even if it had a 0% chance of being committed ever. Second, we added CI, which means that there is positive value to registering the patch in the CommitFest even if committing it is not in the cards. And those things together have created a third problem, which is that the list is now so long and so messy that even the CommitFest managers probably don't manage to go through the whole thing thoroughly in a month. So, our CommitFest application has turned into a patch tracker. IMHO, patch trackers intrinsically tend to suck, because they fill up with garbage that nobody cares about, and nobody wants to do the colossal amount of work that it takes to maintain them. But our patch tracker sucks MORE, because it's not even intended to BE a general-purpose patch tracker. I'm not saying that replacing it with (let me show how old I am) bugzilla or whatever the hip modern equivalent of that may be these days is the right thing to do, but it's probably worth considering. If we decide to roll our own, that might be OK too, but we have to come up with some way of organizing this stuff that's better than what we have today, some way that actually lets you find the stuff that you care about. To give just one example that I think highlights the issues pretty well, consider the "Refactoring" section of the current CommitFest. There are 24 patches in there, and 13 of them are by committers. Now, maybe some of those patches are things that the committer really wants someone else to review, e.g. https://commitfest.postgresql.org/48/3998/ seems like it might be that. On the other hand, that one could also just be an idea Thomas had that he doesn't really intend to pursue even if the reviews are absolutely glowing, so maybe it's not worth spending time on after all. Then there are things that are probably 100% likely to get committed unless somebody objects, so I shouldn't bother looking at them unless I want to object, e.g. https://commitfest.postgresql.org/48/4939/ seems like it's probably that. And, also, regardless of authorship, some of these patches have already had a great deal of discussion, and some have had none, and you can sort of tell that from looking at the time the patch was created vs. the last activity, but it's really not that obvious. So overall it's just really unclear where to spend time. I wonder what ideas people have for improving this situation. I doubt that there's any easy answer that just makes the problem go away -- keeping large groups of people organized is a tremendously difficult task under pretty much all circumstances, and the fact that, in this context, nobody's really the boss, makes it a whole lot harder. But I also feel like what we're doing right now can't possibly be the best that we can do. -- Robert Haas EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
В списке pgsql-hackers по дате отправления: