Re: [Geany-Devel] Zombified pull requests

[Lex Trotman]

On 6 January 2016 at 20:44, Thomas Martitz  wrote:
> Am 06.01.2016 um 04:32 schrieb Matthew Brush:
>>
>>
>> Agree, I sometimes avoid putting LGTM when I think something is a good
>> idea, because I don't want to give the impression that I have (or even will)
>> reviewed or tested it. Maybe just a "thumbs up" could mean "good idea,
>> though I haven't reviewed or tested it"?
>>
>
> Github is a terrible code review platforms. Other platforms do much better:
> 1) Differentiate between [x] I have reviewed [x] I have tested [x] I like
> the change (no test or review)

Just say it in plain old English :) "I (do/do not) like the idea, I
(have/have not) reviewed the implementation and I (have/have not)
tested it on (win/lin/both)."  Thats not a committer/dev prerogative,
anybody can comment.

> 2) Handle updated changesets without losing comments, to the point that you
> can even browse older revisions

Yeah that sucks.

>
> 1) is a problem for reviewers and 2) is a problem for everyone
>
> There are a lot of other, much better code review systems, but I guess we're
> stuck with github (bought into proprietary solution, anyone?)
>
>
>>> To give an example of such a "functionality review", the fractional font
>>> sizes patch
>>>
>>> https://github.com/geany/geany/pull/407
>>>
>>> LGTM - even though I probably won't use it myself, I understand it may be
>>> useful for someone and it modifies just 23 lines so it's nothing
>>> intrusive
>>> and can go in from my point of view.
>>>
>>
>> Agree, and I've actually wanted for this before.
>>
>>> Such a review can be done in a few seconds so if everyone goes through
>>> the
>>> new pull requests from time to time, the patches will receive some
>>> feedback
>>> and it will be clearer whether it's something others want it in Geany.
>>>
>>> 2. Unclear status of some patches. Sometimes it might not be clear in
>>> what
>>> state the pull request is - I'd suggest adding at least the following two
>>> tags:
>>>
>>> needs-work (reviewed with some comments that need to be addressed)
>>> work-in-progress (not meant for review in the current state)
>>>
>>> This will help to distinguish pull requests awaiting merge and pull
>>> requests that aren't there yet.
>>>
>>
>> Sounds like a good idea, I just added those labels. We also already have
>> "reviewed", which I believe means whoever added the label has fully reviewed
>> a PR and it's ready to be merged.
>
>
> I can't put labels on github. The feature seems to be limited to those with
> write access to the repository, so it's useless if we want more reviewers.
>

Please just add a comment, its actually clearer anyway since we don't
have a well defined semantics for the labels :)

>>
>>> 3. Fear that the pull request isn't tested enough. I believe that if a
>>> patch did undergo a review and there doesn't seem anything obviously
>>> wrong
>>> with it, it can be merged to master. I think there's no need for some
>>> long-term private testing of a patch before it gets merged - people using
>>> the development versions of Geany should be aware it may contain bugs and
>>> should know how to deal with them. There are also more eyes so a
>>> potential
>>> bug is spotted earlier. Of course it makes sense getting more
>>> conservative
>>> towards the end of the development cycle to stabilise things.
>>>
>>
>> This is a big one too. Since we don't have a "development" branch (or
>> rather "master" is the development branch), we often have too high
>> standards, only merging stuff that is 100% finished, debugged and ready to
>> release. This kind of defeats the purpose of a development branch.
>>
>> Assuming there's a general consensus that a PR is a good idea, I agree we
>> should start integrating it early, even if there's some possibility it could
>> break things. This way it can get tested in real-life by more than just the
>> person who initiated the PR and others could/would make their own PRs to
>> fixup any perceived issues. When a PR sits off on someone else's repo, it
>> doesn't get real testing, and people (rarely) make PRs against the repo
>> where it came from, where they more likely would if it was in the main repo.
>>
>
> I agree. Currently there is a culture that everything must be perfect prior
> to merging. This is fine in theory but simply doesn't scale. It requires
> endless iterations which in turn require a lot of re-testing, and results in
> PRs sitting for way longer than necessary. Up to the point where the rate of
> new PRs can't be handled.
>
> I agree that PRs should be merged earlier, with possible fix-up/follow-up
> commits in a new PR. This way changes acutally get the testing they need.

The problem with a development branch and with making master more
buggy/less stable is that they will be used less, since its dangerous
to use them day to day.  So the testing will go down even more.

>
>>> OK, these are things that come into my mind regarding the zombie pull
>>> requests but there may be 

Re: [Geany-Devel] Zombified pull requests

[Thomas Martitz]

Am 06.01.2016 um 12:39 schrieb Matthew Brush:

On 2016-01-06 02:44 AM, Thomas Martitz wrote:

Am 06.01.2016 um 04:32 schrieb Matthew Brush:


Agree, I sometimes avoid putting LGTM when I think something is a good
idea, because I don't want to give the impression that I have (or even
will) reviewed or tested it. Maybe just a "thumbs up" could mean "good
idea, though I haven't reviewed or tested it"?



Github is a terrible code review platforms. Other platforms do much 
better:

1) Differentiate between [x] I have reviewed [x] I have tested [x] I
like the change (no test or review)
2) Handle updated changesets without losing comments, to the point that
you can even browse older revisions

1) is a problem for reviewers and 2) is a problem for everyone

There are a lot of other, much better code review systems, but I guess
we're stuck with github (bought into proprietary solution, anyone?)



Not strictly. Given enough demand, and buy-in, we could switch to most 
other such tools. We do have adequate hosting for something better, 
though I doubt there's much desire to switch to a solution that 
doesn't support Git as the VCS. For the most part I find Github to be 
basically adequate myself, though it's not without issues.



Github itself is fine, it's just its code review solution is seriously 
lacking. I also didn't mean to question git, or the use of it. I'm 
saying there are lots of better alternatives in the code review space, 
however I'm not sure if any of them integrates well with github if you 
still use it for hosting, issue tracking and pull requests (assuming 
pull requests via github would still be accepted).


Best regards.
___
Devel mailing list
Devel@lists.geany.org
https://lists.geany.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devel

Re: [Geany-Devel] Zombified pull requests

[Matthew Brush]

On 2016-01-06 02:44 AM, Thomas Martitz wrote:

Am 06.01.2016 um 04:32 schrieb Matthew Brush:


Agree, I sometimes avoid putting LGTM when I think something is a good
idea, because I don't want to give the impression that I have (or even
will) reviewed or tested it. Maybe just a "thumbs up" could mean "good
idea, though I haven't reviewed or tested it"?



Github is a terrible code review platforms. Other platforms do much better:
1) Differentiate between [x] I have reviewed [x] I have tested [x] I
like the change (no test or review)
2) Handle updated changesets without losing comments, to the point that
you can even browse older revisions

1) is a problem for reviewers and 2) is a problem for everyone

There are a lot of other, much better code review systems, but I guess
we're stuck with github (bought into proprietary solution, anyone?)



Not strictly. Given enough demand, and buy-in, we could switch to most 
other such tools. We do have adequate hosting for something better, 
though I doubt there's much desire to switch to a solution that doesn't 
support Git as the VCS. For the most part I find Github to be basically 
adequate myself, though it's not without issues.





To give an example of such a "functionality review", the fractional font
sizes patch

https://github.com/geany/geany/pull/407

LGTM - even though I probably won't use it myself, I understand it
may be
useful for someone and it modifies just 23 lines so it's nothing
intrusive
and can go in from my point of view.



Agree, and I've actually wanted for this before.


Such a review can be done in a few seconds so if everyone goes
through the
new pull requests from time to time, the patches will receive some
feedback
and it will be clearer whether it's something others want it in Geany.

2. Unclear status of some patches. Sometimes it might not be clear in
what
state the pull request is - I'd suggest adding at least the following
two
tags:

needs-work (reviewed with some comments that need to be addressed)
work-in-progress (not meant for review in the current state)

This will help to distinguish pull requests awaiting merge and pull
requests that aren't there yet.



Sounds like a good idea, I just added those labels. We also already
have "reviewed", which I believe means whoever added the label has
fully reviewed a PR and it's ready to be merged.


I can't put labels on github. The feature seems to be limited to those
with write access to the repository, so it's useless if we want more
reviewers.



If not a misconfiguration, I think this is a bummer.




3. Fear that the pull request isn't tested enough. I believe that if a
patch did undergo a review and there doesn't seem anything obviously
wrong
with it, it can be merged to master. I think there's no need for some
long-term private testing of a patch before it gets merged - people
using
the development versions of Geany should be aware it may contain bugs
and
should know how to deal with them. There are also more eyes so a
potential
bug is spotted earlier. Of course it makes sense getting more
conservative
towards the end of the development cycle to stabilise things.



This is a big one too. Since we don't have a "development" branch (or
rather "master" is the development branch), we often have too high
standards, only merging stuff that is 100% finished, debugged and
ready to release. This kind of defeats the purpose of a development
branch.

Assuming there's a general consensus that a PR is a good idea, I agree
we should start integrating it early, even if there's some possibility
it could break things. This way it can get tested in real-life by more
than just the person who initiated the PR and others could/would make
their own PRs to fixup any perceived issues. When a PR sits off on
someone else's repo, it doesn't get real testing, and people (rarely)
make PRs against the repo where it came from, where they more likely
would if it was in the main repo.



I agree. Currently there is a culture that everything must be perfect
prior to merging. This is fine in theory but simply doesn't scale. It
requires endless iterations which in turn require a lot of re-testing,
and results in PRs sitting for way longer than necessary. Up to the
point where the rate of new PRs can't be handled.

I agree that PRs should be merged earlier, with possible
fix-up/follow-up commits in a new PR. This way changes acutally get the
testing they need.


OK, these are things that come into my mind regarding the zombie pull
requests but there may be other problems. What do you think? Do the
points
above look reasonable to you and do you think they might help a bit? Is
there anything else that might help killing the bloody zombies?



4. Lack of collaboration; We tend not to use Git to its full potential
by making pull requests against active pull requests. I don't know if
it's a lack of Git knowledge or that it's too much hassle, but we
rarely seem to do this (I've only done it a couple times, Colomban
does 

Re: [Geany-Devel] Zombified pull requests

[Matthew Brush]

On 2016-01-06 03:47 AM, Lex Trotman wrote:

On 6 January 2016 at 20:44, Thomas Martitz  wrote:

[...]
I agree that PRs should be merged earlier, with possible fix-up/follow-up
commits in a new PR. This way changes acutally get the testing they need.


The problem with a development branch and with making master more
buggy/less stable is that they will be used less, since its dangerous
to use them day to day.  So the testing will go down even more.



I personally don't mind the odd bug cropping up here and there on a 
project which I actively contribute and keep up to date with the 
bleeding-edge development code. Of course if you're doing 
mission-critical stuff, you don't want to be using the bleeding-edge, 
potentially buggy code anyway, the latest release from your distro is 
much less likely to cause grief.






6. Monster PRs [...]


Yes, monster PRs are difficult to deal with [...]


You are right that individual commits on a monster PR don't help much
unless they can be reviewed, tested and committed individually.

The way massive changes are handled on Julia is for the OP to put up a
PR (or just an issue) with a list of the steps required for the whole
change.  Individual PRs that make preparatory changes then refer to
this so there is a context for them and they can be smaller and easier
to review/test.



+1


7. Lack of committers/commits [...]


I agree. The more the merrier, if it helps spreading the workload. Jiří is
an awesome candidate, especially since he's the official MAC guy.

I'd volunteer as well. However, given how I'm constantly failing to do good
PRs initially or even after 2 or 3 revisions (by Colomban's standards), I'm
not sure I'm suitable.


The MOST important thing for a commiter is not killer programming
skills, its maturity.  Can the person be trusted to not commit their
own PRs without others agreement?  Can the person be patient enough to
wait for comments and other people to test, not everybody is available
every day. Does the person understand their own limits, will they ask
before committing to an area they have never touched before?  Having
commit rights is not about getting the persons own PRs into Geany, its
about getting others changes in.



+1


So if you think you can handle the above, I don't see why both you and
Jiri would not be acceptable (assuming Jiri is interested, I don't
know if he was asked :).



+1

Cheers,
Matthew Brush

___
Devel mailing list
Devel@lists.geany.org
https://lists.geany.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devel

Re: [Geany-Devel] Dropping waf

[Frank Lanitz]

On 06.01.2016 11:00, Frank Lanitz wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> It's been a while since Enrico opened
> https://github.com/geany/geany/pull/769
> 
> As we are going straight to March, I'd like to merge it soonish. Any
> comments about this?

For g-p I've just did the step ;)

Cheers,
Frank




signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
___
Devel mailing list
Devel@lists.geany.org
https://lists.geany.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devel

[Geany-Devel] Dropping waf

[Frank Lanitz]

Hi folks,

It's been a while since Enrico opened
https://github.com/geany/geany/pull/769

As we are going straight to March, I'd like to merge it soonish. Any
comments about this?

Cheers,
Frank




signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
___
Devel mailing list
Devel@lists.geany.org
https://lists.geany.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devel

Re: [Geany-Devel] Zombified pull requests

[Thomas Martitz]

Am 06.01.2016 um 12:47 schrieb Lex Trotman:

I can't put labels on github. The feature seems to be limited to those with
write access to the repository, so it's useless if we want more reviewers.


Please just add a comment, its actually clearer anyway since we don't
have a well defined semantics for the labels :)



The advantage of labels is that you see them on the PR overview. Whereas 
with comments you have to open every single PR and look for strings that 
may indicate a review result. While labels can be named arbitrarily, in 
the end there's going to be a handful common ones which can be looked 
out for (I disagree that free-form comments are clearer than labels for 
indicating actual results).


So comments don't scale, whereas labels could be a real help when 
looking through the list of open PRs for potentially ready PRs.






3. Fear that the pull request isn't tested enough. I believe that if a
patch did undergo a review and there doesn't seem anything obviously
wrong
with it, it can be merged to master. I think there's no need for some
long-term private testing of a patch before it gets merged - people using
the development versions of Geany should be aware it may contain bugs and
should know how to deal with them. There are also more eyes so a
potential
bug is spotted earlier. Of course it makes sense getting more
conservative
towards the end of the development cycle to stabilise things.


This is a big one too. Since we don't have a "development" branch (or
rather "master" is the development branch), we often have too high
standards, only merging stuff that is 100% finished, debugged and ready to
release. This kind of defeats the purpose of a development branch.

Assuming there's a general consensus that a PR is a good idea, I agree we
should start integrating it early, even if there's some possibility it could
break things. This way it can get tested in real-life by more than just the
person who initiated the PR and others could/would make their own PRs to
fixup any perceived issues. When a PR sits off on someone else's repo, it
doesn't get real testing, and people (rarely) make PRs against the repo
where it came from, where they more likely would if it was in the main repo.


I agree. Currently there is a culture that everything must be perfect prior
to merging. This is fine in theory but simply doesn't scale. It requires
endless iterations which in turn require a lot of re-testing, and results in
PRs sitting for way longer than necessary. Up to the point where the rate of
new PRs can't be handled.

I agree that PRs should be merged earlier, with possible fix-up/follow-up
commits in a new PR. This way changes acutally get the testing they need.

The problem with a development branch and with making master more
buggy/less stable is that they will be used less, since its dangerous
to use them day to day.  So the testing will go down even more.


You don't use git head even now with supposedly-perfect merges, so you 
are not lost if it would become a bit less stable :-)


There are lots of other people which are brave enough, and that's more 
than the 2 people that test each PR (the reviewer and the author). So 
it's a still a win.


Of course there should be a minimum level of stability that should be kept.




OK, these are things that come into my mind regarding the zombie pull
requests but there may be other problems. What do you think? Do the
points
above look reasonable to you and do you think they might help a bit? Is
there anything else that might help killing the bloody zombies?


4. Lack of collaboration; We tend not to use Git to its full potential by
making pull requests against active pull requests. I don't know if it's a
lack of Git knowledge or that it's too much hassle, but we rarely seem to do
this (I've only done it a couple times, Colomban does it more often I
think). Instead we make comments like "you should do this or that", assuming
that the only person who must make changes is the pull requester. If instead
of making "do this" comments, we made pull requests to show/implement it, it
would give something concrete to discuss and increase collaboration on the
code.

If there is not enough effort to keep up with the commits, there is
even less effort available to make pull requests on top of other
peoples.



It's awkward to use because it's not visible on the original PR. It's often
hard enough to monitor one PR, let alone recursively monitoring PRs in other
repos. Also if there are more than 2 people involved at least some of them
don't see the PR-ontop-of-PR. Lastly, if you actually merge those PRs you
get a weird history with "Merged Pull Request #XX" from different repos (of
course XX changes widely).

I think gists linked to from the original PR would be more natural.

Don't know a good solution to this one, maybe if you want to actually
make changes, just mail the patches to the OP and let them put them up
on the PR.


5. This one applies to many of your PRs Jiří 

Re: [Geany-Devel] Zombified pull requests

[Lex Trotman]

>
> The advantage of labels is that you see them on the PR overview. Whereas
> with comments you have to open every single PR and look for strings that may
> indicate a review result. While labels can be named arbitrarily, in the end
> there's going to be a handful common ones which can be looked out for (I
> disagree that free-form comments are clearer than labels for indicating
> actual results).
>
> So comments don't scale, whereas labels could be a real help when looking
> through the list of open PRs for potentially ready PRs.
>

This is true, but I think only those with rights on the repo can use
them, but comments are available to everyone.

[..]
>
> You don't use git head even now with supposedly-perfect merges, so you are
> not lost if it would become a bit less stable :-)

Actually I do ... and its GTK3!! :)

[...]
>> Yes, better tests for the non-GUI areas would make them easier to
>> change.  Your offer to write the tests is accepted :)
>
>
> Tests are written when 1) a change to the code is prepared and the test
> verifies that change or b) when a bug is fixed and the test verifies the bug
> is truly fixed. Just writing tests out of the blue (I don't intend to make a
> change or fix a bug there) don't work.
>
> However we could start demanding tests as part of PRs (where applicable) and
> perhaps integrate with Travis / other CI.
>
> On the other hand, demanding tests might drive contributors away.

Yeah, its a bit of a no-win, but we should always ask (if the change
is in a non-GUI part).

>
>
>>
 6. Monster PRs. This goes along with #3. Sometimes PRs are just too big
 to
 be digested by volunteer developers all at once. If we started
 integrating
 such larger changes earlier, and in smaller pieces, I think it would
 increase the likelihood of getting the feature/changes merged into the
 master branch. When a PR is so big, it basically takes as much time to
 fully
 review and test it as it did to make the changes in the first place. I
 personally rarely merge pull requests unless I've reviewed and
 understand
 each line of code that changed, and tested all the cases I can think of.
 As
 volunteer like the rest of us, I just simply can't afford to spend
 days/weeks reviewing, understanding, and testing such large PRs,
 especially
 if I'm rather indifferent on the feature/improvement they implement.

>>> Yes, monster PRs are difficult to deal with. But on the other hand I get
>>> the
>>> response that "I don't like to merge this if nothing uses it right now"
>>> (when making a groundwork change required by a later one) when attempting
>>> to
>>> make smaller, incremental changes. Both views are reasonable. Plus,
>>> changes
>>> that merely lay the groundwork and don't have any impact itself seem to
>>> have
>>> very low review priority and are merged with large delay, if at all.
>>>
>>> I also have learned that breaking up large changes into lots of small
>>> commits doesn't help either. It still makes the PR as a whole rather
>>> large
>>> and lots of commits are not handy to deal with either.
>>
>> You are right that individual commits on a monster PR don't help much
>> unless they can be reviewed, tested and committed individually.
>>
>> The way massive changes are handled on Julia is for the OP to put up a
>> PR (or just an issue) with a list of the steps required for the whole
>> change.  Individual PRs that make preparatory changes then refer to
>> this so there is a context for them and they can be smaller and easier
>> to review/test.
>
>
> That's a good idea. IIRC you can even draw checkboxes / todo lists in github
> comments?

Yep, and tick 'em off as they are done.

>
> However there is another catch: I'm hesitent to make PRs on top of other PRs
> (even in the same repository). Heck, I don't know even it's possible. The
> catch is that even if I break large changes into multiple PRs, I can still
> open the PRs only sequientially, so the 2nd PR after the 1st one is complete
> and merged. This makes it hard to see upcoming changes in the context of of
> the early PRs. Is there a solution to this catch?

I'm not aware of a technical solution to that, indeed sometimes if the
OP is impatient there will be PRs that depend on preceding PRs if they
take a while to commit, but at least you can see the dependence in the
overview description and sort of expect it.

>
>
> Best regards.
> ___
> Devel mailing list
> Devel@lists.geany.org
> https://lists.geany.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devel
___
Devel mailing list
Devel@lists.geany.org
https://lists.geany.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devel

Re: [Geany-Devel] Zombified pull requests

[Jiří Techet]

Hi Lex,

On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 4:12 AM, Lex Trotman  wrote:

> Hi Jiri,
>
> Its a worthwhile thing to talk about. Some specific comments below,
> but first a couple of general ones.
>
> I occasionally talk to some of the Geany devs/contributors in other
> forums and its clear that at this moment Geany isn't their primary
> focus.  That is my situation, which is why I concentrate on ML and
> issue replies, they only take a few minutes at a time, suitable for a
> break from my other activities, but not a significant time usage.  And
> hopefully that saves other devs and contributors from spending time on
> initial obvious errors and omissions in reports.
>

This is clear and I understand completely people don't have that much time
for Geany (myself included). I wasn't actually talking about the time it
takes to get a patch reviewed (which can be longer because people don't
have time for Geany, but this is fine) but rather the pull requests that
seem to be "done" but they are just unmerged.


>
> Note that if I didn't use the latest Git version of Geany for day to
> day work I would almost never test it, so testing PRs means including
> them into the Geany I am using for my other work, which I consider
> risky if I don't know the contributor or the PR is big, so I don't
> test them much.  Primary contributors or devs PRs only.
>
> But I will stop using the latest for day to day work if it becomes
> unreliable, so I depend on all patches being inspected and tested
> before commit.  And by test I don't mean 5 minutes tick and flick, but
> *used* for some time, lets say at least a week.  So PRs for
> features/languages I don't use won't get tested either. Colombans #852
> is an example at the moment, have incorporated it and if it works fine
> for a week I'll commit it.
>

I'm definitely not suggesting to make master a collection of crappy and
crashing code. But IMO if both the patch author and reviewer tried the code
and it doesn't seem to cause any problem and if the patch was reviewed, I
think it receives the best field testing in master. Everyone uses Geany in
a different way and the reviewer won't probably notice a problem that
happens only under some special occasion anyway.

Matthew nicely called the current situation as "too high standards" - I
feel Colomban set such a high bar with his great code reviews that everyone
else is scared to review the code and all the work is left on Colomban.


>
> And since I am not testing PRs much, I am not in a position to commit them
> much.
>
> But not many people other than committers seem to review/test patches.
> It should not be just up to the committers to review and test PRs.  If
> there were more people doing that, then there is less pressure on
> committers to be responsible for the whole thing.  A cheery comment "I
> like this and have been using it for the last month on system XXX with
> no problems" will go a long way to getting stuff committed.
>
> What I do on Asciidoc for PRs that I can't/won't test, is to require
> at least one person, other than the proposer, to acknowledge
> usefulness, and to report tested ok in actual use.  Then I will commit
> it, without trying it myself (Colomban spins in his bed :).  Of course
> if a recommender turns out to be unreliable then they will be
> subsequently ignored, but I haven't had any problems to date.
>
> I suspect many of the comments above apply to other devs/contributors as
> well.
>
> On 6 January 2016 at 06:46, Jiří Techet  wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > happy new year and let's celebrate it with something cheerful - zombies!
>
> :)
>
> >
> > I've noticed there are more and more pull requests on github which don't
> get
> > merged to Geany. It's clear that people are fighting with time to make
> > reviews of pull requests (and Colomban does a great job here!), however,
> it
> > seems to me there are quite many patches where all the hard work has
> already
> > been done (review, patch updates) and the only missing thing is the
> merge -
> > which doesn't happen.
> >
> > I think this is quite unfortunate - there are many patches which might be
> > useful for users; at the same time it might be discouraging for
> contributors
> > to see their patches unmerged.
> >
> > I've been thinking about what may be the cause of this and several things
> > come to my mind:
> >
> > 1. Not enough feedback from other developers. Typically I am for
> instance in
> > the mode "I don't want to add too much noise" so unless I love or hate
> > something, I just don't write anything. I think Colomban's own patches
> > suffer from this most as he reviews other people's patches but there's no
> > feedback for his own patches.
> >
> > Maybe it would be a good idea if regular Geany contributors go through
> the
> > pull requests from time to time and just LGTM those that sound reasonable
> > functionality-wise. I'm not talking about full code review here, just a
> very
> > quick assessment whether the 

Re: [Geany-Devel] Zombified pull requests

[Jiří Techet]

Hi Matthew,

On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 4:32 AM, Matthew Brush  wrote:

> On 2016-01-05 12:46 PM, Jiří Techet wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> happy new year and let's celebrate it with something cheerful - zombies!
>>
>>
> Wouldn't they only be zombies if we closed them and they re-opened
> themselves? :)


Ah, right, I wasn't fully aware of the zombie lifecycle :-).


>
>
> I've noticed there are more and more pull requests on github which don't
>> get merged to Geany. It's clear that people are fighting with time to make
>> reviews of pull requests (and Colomban does a great job here!), however,
>> it
>> seems to me there are quite many patches where all the hard work has
>> already been done (review, patch updates) and the only missing thing is
>> the
>> merge - which doesn't happen.
>>
>> I think this is quite unfortunate - there are many patches which might be
>> useful for users; at the same time it might be discouraging for
>> contributors to see their patches unmerged.
>>
>> I've been thinking about what may be the cause of this and several things
>> come to my mind:
>>
>> 1. Not enough feedback from other developers. Typically I am for instance
>> in the mode "I don't want to add too much noise" so unless I love or hate
>> something, I just don't write anything. I think Colomban's own patches
>> suffer from this most as he reviews other people's patches but there's no
>> feedback for his own patches.
>>
>> Maybe it would be a good idea if regular Geany contributors go through the
>> pull requests from time to time and just LGTM those that sound reasonable
>> functionality-wise. I'm not talking about full code review here, just a
>> very quick assessment whether the given feature makes sense for Geany (we
>> should distinguish somehow "I made a review of the patch and LGTM" and
>> "the
>> functionality LTGM to be in Geany").
>>
>>
> Agree, I sometimes avoid putting LGTM when I think something is a good
> idea, because I don't want to give the impression that I have (or even
> will) reviewed or tested it. Maybe just a "thumbs up" could mean "good
> idea, though I haven't reviewed or tested it"?


Yeah, sounds better than LGBI's :-)


>
>
> To give an example of such a "functionality review", the fractional font
>> sizes patch
>>
>> https://github.com/geany/geany/pull/407
>>
>> LGTM - even though I probably won't use it myself, I understand it may be
>> useful for someone and it modifies just 23 lines so it's nothing intrusive
>> and can go in from my point of view.
>>
>>
> Agree, and I've actually wanted for this before.
>
> Such a review can be done in a few seconds so if everyone goes through the
>> new pull requests from time to time, the patches will receive some
>> feedback
>> and it will be clearer whether it's something others want it in Geany.
>>
>> 2. Unclear status of some patches. Sometimes it might not be clear in what
>> state the pull request is - I'd suggest adding at least the following two
>> tags:
>>
>> needs-work (reviewed with some comments that need to be addressed)
>> work-in-progress (not meant for review in the current state)
>>
>> This will help to distinguish pull requests awaiting merge and pull
>> requests that aren't there yet.
>>
>>
> Sounds like a good idea, I just added those labels. We also already have
> "reviewed", which I believe means whoever added the label has fully
> reviewed a PR and it's ready to be merged.
>
> 3. Fear that the pull request isn't tested enough. I believe that if a
>> patch did undergo a review and there doesn't seem anything obviously wrong
>> with it, it can be merged to master. I think there's no need for some
>> long-term private testing of a patch before it gets merged - people using
>> the development versions of Geany should be aware it may contain bugs and
>> should know how to deal with them. There are also more eyes so a potential
>> bug is spotted earlier. Of course it makes sense getting more conservative
>> towards the end of the development cycle to stabilise things.
>>
>>
> This is a big one too. Since we don't have a "development" branch (or
> rather "master" is the development branch), we often have too high
> standards, only merging stuff that is 100% finished, debugged and ready to
> release. This kind of defeats the purpose of a development branch.
>
> Assuming there's a general consensus that a PR is a good idea, I agree we
> should start integrating it early, even if there's some possibility it
> could break things. This way it can get tested in real-life by more than
> just the person who initiated the PR and others could/would make their own
> PRs to fixup any perceived issues. When a PR sits off on someone else's
> repo, it doesn't get real testing, and people (rarely) make PRs against the
> repo where it came from, where they more likely would if it was in the main
> repo.
>
> OK, these are things that come into my mind regarding the zombie pull
>> requests but there may be other problems. What do you think? 

Re: [Geany-Devel] RFC: Merge C and C++ Filetypes (no troll)

[Matthew Brush]

On 2016-01-06 12:23 PM, Thomas Martitz wrote:

Am 06.01.2016 um 21:12 schrieb Jiří Techet:



It's indeed at least interesting to consider, because at least for .h
headers there really is some mixed stuff all over the place -- even,
simply look in Scintilla's source tree.


+1 for having the headers parsed/lexed by the C++ parser (with sources
it may be a bit dangerous and typically the sources have the right C++
extension).




Not replying to Jiří specifically.

-1. .h is legitimately a C, it's just that many people get it wrong. And
I don't want C++ keywords highlighted in C headers while they are not
highlighted it C source files. This is just confusing.



Why is .h any more C than C++ or Obj-C? Because it came first? I agree 
it's stupid that in the later part of last millennium, they decided on 
the convention to use .h for C++ and Obj-C (and others?) headers since 
it was already a convention in C, but it did become a convention in C++ 
and now it's widely used, for example [0][1][2][3] among many, many others.


What's more, it's especially useful to see C++ keywords highlighted in 
.h header files, since they can be included in C++ as well as C[4][5][6] 
unless their author wants to make them less useful by using said 
keywords in the header. I think the most common case would be someone 
doing it inadvertently (as happened in Geany), which is where having 
them highlighted differently gives a visual queue that something is 
wrong[7].


Cheers,
Matthew Brush

[0]: https://git.gnome.org/browse/gtkmm/tree/gtk/gtkmm
[1]: https://github.com/qtproject/qtbase/tree/dev/src/corelib/global
[2]: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/latest-doxygen/files.html
[3]: http://sourceforge.net/p/scintilla/code/ci/default/tree/src/
[4]: https://git.gnome.org/browse/gtk+/tree/gtk/gtkwidget.h#n38
[5]: https://github.com/spurious/SDL-mirror/blob/master/include/SDL.h#L61
[6]: 
http://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=include/stdlib.h;h=352339e8595eb8229018cb27f7d2decf63f511c7;hb=HEAD#l16
[7]: Or if the author is being evil on purpose, it gives them the smug 
satisfaction that they're making life hard for C++ programmers :)

___
Devel mailing list
Devel@lists.geany.org
https://lists.geany.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devel

Re: [Geany-Devel] RFC: Merge C and C++ Filetypes (no troll)

[Thomas Martitz]

Am 06.01.2016 um 21:12 schrieb Jiří Techet:



It's indeed at least interesting to consider, because at least for .h
headers there really is some mixed stuff all over the place -- even,
simply look in Scintilla's source tree.


+1 for having the headers parsed/lexed by the C++ parser (with sources 
it may be a bit dangerous and typically the sources have the right C++ 
extension).





Not replying to Jiří specifically.

-1. .h is legitimately a C, it's just that many people get it wrong. And 
I don't want C++ keywords highlighted in C headers while they are not 
highlighted it C source files. This is just confusing.


Best regards
___
Devel mailing list
Devel@lists.geany.org
https://lists.geany.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devel