[Freeipa-devel] Reviewer in Trac

[Tomas Babej]

On 02/20/2014 04:34 PM, Petr Viktorin wrote:
> On 02/20/2014 04:15 PM, Simo Sorce wrote:
>> On Thu, 2014-02-20 at 16:13 +0100, Martin Kosek wrote:
>>> On 02/20/2014 04:09 PM, Simo Sorce wrote:
>>>> On Thu, 2014-02-20 at 15:59 +0100, Martin Kosek wrote:
>>>>> On 02/20/2014 03:52 PM, Jakub Hrozek wrote:
>>>>>> On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 01:22:56PM +0100, Petr Viktorin wrote:
>>>>>>> On 02/20/2014 01:14 PM, Martin Kosek wrote:
>>>>>>>> We had a discussion with other developers how better track who
>>>>>>>> is reviewing
>>>>>>>> which patch. Recently, we introduced the Reviewed-By tag in a
>>>>>>>> commit message,
>>>>>>>> but that is a post-review tag which is not useful for someone
>>>>>>>> who wants to know
>>>>>>>> which patches are already reviewed and which are not reviewed.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> We were testing Patch Work [1] in last months to contain this
>>>>>>>> information, but
>>>>>>>> I personally think that it is suboptimal - it introduces 2
>>>>>>>> tracking tools that
>>>>>>>> needs to be maintained (Trac and Patch Work) and the Patch Work
>>>>>>>> still requires
>>>>>>>> lot of manual actions when maintaining it's state.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> I think it would be better to hold this information rather in a
>>>>>>>> single tracking
>>>>>>>> tool - Trac. There are 2 options:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> 1) "Patch on review" flag, similar to "Patch posted for review"
>>>>>>>> flag which
>>>>>>>> would hold 1 bit information if the patch is just lying there
>>>>>>>> or has somebody
>>>>>>>> assigned.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> 2) "Reviewed by" text field which would hold a login of a
>>>>>>>> person who is
>>>>>>>> reviewing it. It would be filled either by a person starting
>>>>>>>> the review or by a
>>>>>>>> supervisor like me to forcefully assign a reviewer ;-)
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> With that information in Trac, we could run using a single
>>>>>>>> tracking tool for
>>>>>>>> all patches that have a ticket (which is 95% of patches). It
>>>>>>>> would be then
>>>>>>>> fairly easy to see which patches are sent for review but are
>>>>>>>> reviewer-less.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> It would also have a benefit for Petr's sendpatches.py script
>>>>>>>> which could pull
>>>>>>>> the reviewer from a ticket and one would not have to use the
>>>>>>>> "-r" option to
>>>>>>>> hard code a reviewer.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Any objections to using "Reviewed by" field?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> +1, this is the only thing I used Patchwork for, and keeping
>>>>>>> Patchwork up to date just for this took a lot of unnecessary
>>>>>>> mindless clicking.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Just a nitpick: name it "Patch Reviewer"
>>>>>>> - there's more to a ticket than a patch
>>>>>>> - the review is not done yet when the field is filled out
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The only use-case I use patchwork for right now is a 'dashboard'
>>>>>> to see
>>>>>> which patches need attention. If we could get this dashboard-like
>>>>>> view
>>>>>> from Trac with some custom query, then I'm fine with deprecating
>>>>>> Patchwork.
>>>>>
>>>>> +1. I would like to add the reviewer to default report 3 + prepare
>>>>> a new view
>>>>> "My Active Reviews by Milestone" to see the reviews which one
>>>>> should track.
>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> However, one feature of patchwork was that each re-submission of a
>>>>>> patch triggered a new thread so as a reviewer you could easily
>>>>>> see there
>>>>>> is a new instance of the patch that you need to look at. I
>>>>>> suspect Trac
>>>>>> wouldn't give us anything like that?
>>>>>
>>>>> When I get a review, I like to get the response to inbox - then I
>>>>> always know.
>>>>> When replies are only being sent to the list, we would have to use
>>>>> the advanced
>>>>> Trac workflow and cautiously change states between accepted -
>>>>> submitted - onreview.
>>>>
>>>> I think this means we'll be back to have to carefully track the
>>>> mailing
>>>> list because stuff will be missed. This is something patchwork
>>>> "fixed".
>
> No. The only thing that happened automatically in Patchwork was that
> entries got created. Patchwork doesn't even have threads - each
> version of a patch needed to be individually marked as superseded.
> Very much mindless clicking is needed to keep Patchwork up to date.
>

Manually marking all the lost threads as superseeded was the exact
reason I stopped using Patchwork.

>>>> I wonder if we can build some automatism to not loose the good things
>>>> here.
>>>>
>>>> Simo.
>>>
>>> Majority of patches going to freeipa-devel are tied to some Trac
>>> ticket. These
>>> are tracked and watched by the on_review flag and the new reviewer
>>> field.
>>
>> If people remember to do it every time they just send an email, very
>> process heavy.
>
> How is this different from Patchwork?
>
>>> Those that are not covered by any Trac ticket need to be tracked and
>>> cared of
>>> manually by the submitter IMO.
>>
>> Not very friendly to external submitters.
>
> External submitters can easily open tickets.
>
>> I guess I'll keep the patchwork instance up for now ...
>
> I was basically the only one who used the IPA Patchwork any more. I
> have stopped using it and I'm waiting for the Patch Reviewer field (in
> any form!).
> Without someone to *manually* mark all the patches as On review, then
> Changes Requested, then Pushed... Patchwork is quite useless.
>
> You can keep it running but no one from the FreeIPA team will use it.
> Sorry.
>

Patchwork would be a great tool, if it could automatically derive the
information it needs (work with threads properly, set patch status
depending on the email headers / keywords in the text). Having to
manually update it however, it becomes too heavyweight, because of the
imperfections Petr mentioned.

The proposal we have for the reviewer field does not solve the problem,
but the actual maintenance load becomes much lighter, and we do get the
reasonable portion of benefit.

My 2 cents,

-- 
Tomas Babej
Associate Software Engeneer | Red Hat | Identity Management
RHCE | Brno Site | IRC: tbabej | freeipa.org