Hi all, Kafka currently uses a combination of Review Board and JIRA for contributions and code review. In my opinion, this makes contribution and code review a bit harder than it has to be.
I think the approach used by Spark would improve the current situation: "Generally, Spark uses JIRA to track logical issues, including bugs and improvements, and uses Github pull requests to manage the review and merge of specific code changes. That is, JIRAs are used to describe what should be fixed or changed, and high-level approaches, and pull requests describe how to implement that change in the project's source code. For example, major design decisions are discussed in JIRA."[1] It's worth reading the wiki page for all the details, but I will summarise the suggested workflow for code changes: 1. Fork the Github repository at http://github.com/apache/kafka (if you haven't already) 2. git checkout -b kafka-XXX 3. Make one or more commits (smaller commits can be easier to review and reviewboard makes that hard) 4. git push origin kafka-XXX 5. Create PR against upstream/trunk (this will update JIRA automatically[2] and it will send an email to the dev mailing list too) 6. A CI build will be triggered[3] 7. Review process happens on GitHub (it's quite handy to be able to comment on both commit or PR-level, unlike Review Board) 8. Once all feedback has been addressed and the build is green, a variant of the `merge_spark_pr.py`[4] script is used to squash, merge, push, close the PR and JIRA issue. The squashed commit generated by the script includes a bunch of useful information including links to the original commits[5] (in the future, I think it's worth reconsidering the squashing of commits, but retaining the information in the commit is already an improvement) Neha merged a couple of commits via GitHub already and it went smoothly although we are still missing a few of the pieces described above: 1. CI builds triggered by GitHub PRs (this is supported by Apache Infra, we need to request it for Kafka and provide whatever configuration is needed) 2. Adapting Spark's merge_park_pr script and integrating it into the kafka Git repository 3. Updating the Kafka contribution wiki and adding a CONTRIBUTING.md to the Git repository (this is shown when someone is creating a pull request) 4. Go through existing GitHub pull requests and close the ones that are no longer relevant (there are quite a few as people have been opening them over the years, but nothing was done about most of them) 5. Other things I may be missing I am volunteering to help with the above if people agree that this is the right direction for Kafka. Thoughts? Best. Ismael P.S. I was told in the Apache Infra HipChat that it's not currently possible (and there are no plans to change that in the near future) to use the GitHub merge button to merge PRs. The merge script does quite a few useful things that the merge button does not in any case. [1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/SPARK/Contributing+to+Spark [2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-1054?focusedCommentId=14513614&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-14513614 [3] https://blogs.apache.org/infra/entry/github_pull_request_builds_now [4] https://github.com/apache/spark/blob/master/dev/merge_spark_pr.py [5] https://github.com/apache/spark/commit/59b7cfc41b2c06fbfbf6aca16c1619496a8d1d00
