Mailing List Archive: Wikipedia: Wikitech

Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

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z at mzmcbride

Apr 6, 2012, 7:44 PM

Post #26 of 29 (80 views)
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Re: Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member) [In reply to]

Petr Bena wrote:
> My point is that if review of 15 lines of code, takes 6+ months, there
is very
> likely a reason for improvement of current process, which may
look as
> "working". If I knew it works like it actually works I would
never tried to
> work on what I did. So if there is not going to be
improvement in this area,
> there should either be notification that
review of code may take years unless
> you work for wmf on the page
describing the current process, or people from
> community shouldn't be
even suggested to work on that.

Regarding the 15 lines of code, are you referring to
<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32819>? It looks like a bug
was submitted on December 6. Less than a week later, Bawolff came along and
reviewed the code (on December 15; see comment 3). And then you never
responded to any of the review he left. Did you simply overlook it? It seems
rather strange that you'd complain about this situation, though, so perhaps
you're talking about a different 15 lines of code? Clarification would be
appreciated. :-)

There are a lot of problems with Wikimedia's/MediaWiki's code review
processes, but in this particular case, it looks like the ball is in your
court. (And, for what it's worth, I'm not sure your implementation of the
idea makes much sense; see my comment on the bug.)

And if you'd like to document the current practices/procedures regarding
code review (including the excessive wait time), you're more than welcome to
create or update a page on Meta-Wiki or MediaWiki.org (or several pages, go
wild!). Tim's suggestion that to document the current situation somehow
makes it more real is incredibly silly and can safely be ignored. Giving
volunteer developers fair warning is the right thing to do, even if it
currently involves ugly truths.

MZMcBride

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hashar+wmf at free

Apr 7, 2012, 12:36 AM

Post #27 of 29 (82 views)
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Re: Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member) [In reply to]

Le 06/04/12 20:49, Erik Moeller wrote:
> I'd love more metrics, of course. Do we have any git/gerrit metrics already?

Gerrit is based on a SQL database, so we could probably build some
reporting of activity. One possible metric would be the time between
patch submission and its actual merging or abandon.

--
Antoine "hashar" Musso

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sumanah at wikimedia

Apr 10, 2012, 5:02 AM

Post #28 of 29 (78 views)
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Re: Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member) [In reply to]

On 04/04/2012 09:14 AM, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
> Petr:
>
> My sympathies on the frustration. First I'm going to talk about the
> problem in general, then about your issue.

I can't tell whether anyone read my message on the 4th. I know it was
long, but that's because I was addressing pretty much all the open
questions at the time. :-) If you have concerns about this issue,
please do read it.

Petr replied to me offlist to straighten out his particular situation.
It sounds like for one of his extensions the ball is in his court, and
for the other (OnlineStatusBar), it's in the WMF's.

I've updated three pages to clarify and document our process:
* https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Writing_an_extension_for_deployment now
explains that I'm the point of contact to get extensions authors their
initial technical design reviews, Howie Fung is their contact to get
initial user experience design reviews, and the release manager is their
contact to get reviewed code deployed.

* https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Review_queue now has the status of each
extension; about 8 are waiting for more WMF work, and 9 are waiting for
responses from extension authors.

* https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Deployment_queue

So I need to get some user experience reviews and some technical/code
reviews going for the 8 extensions that are awaiting more WMF work. Tim
suggested that it might be more efficient and pleasant if WMF engineers
could concentrate on one project each for their 20% community service
time, and RobLa has now decided that I should be the one prioritizing
and allocating 20%-time responsibilities. So I'm going to be asking
some WMF engineers if they could switch from doing patch review (in
Gerrit) to reviewing particular extensions, for their 20% days. I have
a few people in mind.

Another snag, in at least one case, was that WMF engineers are unclear
on who qualifies for deployment privileges and how to get them. That's
something we started talking about in December in
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-December/thread.html#56982
and that still needs followup - I believe Ian is going to put some
preliminary notes on mediawiki.org soon, and Platform Engineering
(specifically RobLa & I) will follow up on that.

Hope this helps.

--
Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation

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hashar+wmf at free

Apr 12, 2012, 2:17 AM

Post #29 of 29 (72 views)
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Re: Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member) [In reply to]

MZMcBride wrote:
> There are a lot of problems with Wikimedia's/MediaWiki's code review
> processes, but in this particular case, it looks like the ball is in your
> court. (And, for what it's worth, I'm not sure your implementation of the
> idea makes much sense; see my comment on the bug.)

Hello,

We also tends to be overwhelmed by mails, so a quick personal mail can
often help having a specific code / bug to be rereviewed. Some
volunteers are sending me direct mails from time to time which is great
when I have miss a notification email.

I have no idea how many mail notifications I am receiving, but I am sure
I am missing notifications. To give the readers an idea I get mails from:

- all mediawiki/core code review
- my changes made to operations/puppet
- some WMF only notifications lists
- bugs I am subscribed too
- upstream bugs I have reported
- mw.org watchlist notifications

Weekend included, which is part of the reason my 20% is on Monday :-]

Whenever you do a comment, submit a patch, if nobody respond after
someday, make sure they have actually seen your submission. If not ping
them on IRC and then send a personal mail.

As for extensions review, I wish I could do some but I am already too
busy keeping up with core, testing and continuous integration though.
Unfortunately days are only 24hours :-((

cheers,

--
Antoine "hashar" Musso

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