Clarification about "Better tooling for reviews", was Re: Google Doc about the Contributors' Summit

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi Junio,

On Fri, 10 Feb 2017, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Johannes Schindelin  writes:
> 
> > Technically, it is not a write-up, and I never meant it to be that. I
> > intended this document to help me remember what had been discussed,
> > and I doubt it is useful at all to anybody who has not been there.
> >
> > I abused the Git mailing list to share that link, what I really should
> > have done is to use an URL shortener and jot the result down on the
> > whiteboard.
> >
> > Very sorry for that,
> 
> Heh, no need to apologize.

Well, you clearly misunderstood the purpose of the document, and that was
my fault, as I had not made that clear.

> I saw your  that was
> sent to the list long after the event, which obviously no longer
> meant for collaborative note taking and thought that you are
> inviting others to read the result of that note taking, and that is
> why I commented on that.

Of course you are free to read it, and to guess from the sparse notes
around what the discussions revolved. I do not think that you'll get much
out of the notes, though.

> I've hopefully touched some "ask Junio what he thinks of this" items and
> the whole thing was not wasted ;-)

I am afraid that it was quite clear to everybody in the room "what you
think of this".

And I do not think that your clarifications how you review code had any
direct relation with the discussions in particular about better tooling
for the review process.

To open the discussion of that particular part of the Contributors'
Summit, I mentioned a couple of pain points, and the remainder of the
discussion really revolved around those, constructively so, I want to add:

- we actively keep potential contributors out by insisting that email
  communication is the most open and inclusive, when right off the bat,
  without any notice to anybody, our mailing list rejects mails sent both
  by the most popular desktop mail client as well as by the most popular
  web mail client.

- developers who really, really want to contribute may switch email
  clients or try to configure their existing email clients to skip the
  HTML part of their emails, only to be met with the reply "your patch is
  white-space corrupted" which cannot fail to sound harsh.

- the few contributors not deterred by this problem, and persistent enough
  to try until they manage to get through, often drop the ball after being
  met with suggestions that would ideally be addressed by automation so
  that humans can focus on problems only humans can solve (every time I
  read "this line is too long" in a review I want to cry: how is this
  worth the time of contributor or reviewer? There are *tools* for that).

- discussions often veer into completely tangential topics so that the
  actual review of the patches is drowned out (and subsequently
  forgotten).

- for any given patch series, it requires a good amount of manual digging
  to figure out what its current state is: what reviewers' comments are
  still unaddressed? Is the patch series in pu/next/master yet? Is the
  *correct* iteration of the patch series in pu/next/master? How does the
  version in pu/next/master differ from what the contributor has in their
  local repository? etc

- the closest thing to "this is the state of that patch series" is the
  What's Cooking email that neither CC:s the original contributors nor
  does it bear any reliable link to the original patch mail, let alone the
  original commit(s) in the contributor's repository.

I really do not think that any of your descriptions of your workflow and
of your review priorities could possibly be expected to fix any of these.

I have an additional pain point, of course, in that your priorities in
patch review (let's admit that it is not a code review, but a patch review
instead, and as such limited in other ways than just the lack of focus on
avoiding potential bugs) are unfortunate in my opinion. But that is not
your problem.

It is clear to me that these pain points only affect potential
contributors (and some of them only frequent contributors who are as
uncomfortable with the sheer amount of tedious "where is that mail that
contained that patch? Oh, and what was the latest reply to this one? Okay,
and in which worktree do I have those changes again?" type of things that
really should not by *my* burden, given that we are trying to develop an
application that helps relieve developers of tedious burden by automating
recurring tasks).

That is why I did not call session "Let's criticize Junio for something
that does not even bother him", but instead "Better tooling for reviews".

The only way forward, as I see it, is for other like-minded contributors
(one of the GitMerge talks even dedicated a good chunk of time to the
description of the pitfalls of the Git mailing list, and home-grown tools
to work around them, so I am definitely not alone) to come together and
try to consolidate and 

Re: Google Doc about the Contributors' Summit

[Junio C Hamano]

Johannes Schindelin  writes:

> Technically, it is not a write-up, and I never meant it to be that. I
> intended this document to help me remember what had been discussed, and I
> doubt it is useful at all to anybody who has not been there.
>
> I abused the Git mailing list to share that link, what I really should
> have done is to use an URL shortener and jot the result down on the
> whiteboard.
>
> Very sorry for that,

Heh, no need to apologize.

I saw your  that was
sent to the list long after the event, which obviously no longer
meant for collaborative note taking and thought that you are
inviting others to read the result of that note taking, and that is
why I commented on that.  I've hopefully touched some "ask Junio
what he thinks of this" items and the whole thing was not wasted ;-)

Re: Google Doc about the Contributors' Summit

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi Junio,

On Thu, 9 Feb 2017, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Johannes Schindelin  writes:
> 
> > I just started typing stuff up in a Google Doc, and made it editable to
> > everyone, feel free to help and add things:
> >
> > https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KDoSn4btbK5VJCVld32he29U0pUeFGhpFxyx9ZJDDB0/edit?usp=sharing
> 
> Thanks for a write-up, Dscho.

Technically, it is not a write-up, and I never meant it to be that. I
intended this document to help me remember what had been discussed, and I
doubt it is useful at all to anybody who has not been there.

I abused the Git mailing list to share that link, what I really should
have done is to use an URL shortener and jot the result down on the
whiteboard.

Very sorry for that,
Johannes

Re: Google Doc about the Contributors' Summit

[Junio C Hamano]

Johannes Schindelin  writes:

> I just started typing stuff up in a Google Doc, and made it editable to
> everyone, feel free to help and add things:
>
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KDoSn4btbK5VJCVld32he29U0pUeFGhpFxyx9ZJDDB0/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks for a write-up, Dscho.

List of bullet points just make non-attendees envious, imagining
that attendees had all the fun discussing what is behind these
bullet points, without being able to know what was discussed, if
they reached consensus and what the consensus was, but it is OK ;-)

A few items caught my attention, not because I found them more
important than other items on the page, but because they seem to
want my input without directly asking me ;-)

* If Junio would accept patches by replying to the sender with an
  ID and/or a patch name. He picks this (branch) name when he gets
  your patch.

I am not sure what exactly I am asked to "accept" here.  I sometimes
forget to respond with "Thanks, will queue." to the patch message
and whoever said this wants me to consistently do so?  I never say
"... will queue as js/difftool-builtin topic." mainly because I do
not know what the name of the topic branch should be at the point of
reading the patch.  All I know is that decided that it may be worth
queuing, so it is a bit harder to arrange.  But I can certainly try
if it makes the lives of contributors easier.


* Junio has a script for the todo branch which we can use to
  generate the what's cooking branch. Perhaps we could continuously
  generate this onto a webpage.

I have no objection, but I doubt that people find such an auto
generated version all that useful, as "git log --first-parent
origin/master..origin/pu" would tell exactly the same story.  It
will lack the "topic summary" comment I have yet to write, if the
final 'pu' of the day that was pushed out was before my local update
to the draft of the next issue of "What's cooking" report [*1*], and
would not have any update on the next action (e.g. "Will merge to
...") relative to the latest issue of "What's cooking" report.  IOW,
such an auto-generated report lacks all the added value over "git log"
output.


* Making the actual workflow more publicly known, e.g. document how
  to generate the cooking email, to learn about the state of a
  generation.

The exact mechanics of "how to generate" may be of less importance
than "how the information contained therein relates to their own
work" to the contributors, and I think MaintNotes that is sent out
at key milestones more or less covers the mechanics, but here is how
the sausage is made these days:

- I find a patch series on the list that is in good enough shape to
  be in 'pu'.  Perhaps it was already discussed and redone a few
  times without hitting my tree.  Or it may be the first attempt of
  a new topic.  I come up with a topic name, decide where the topic
  should fork at [*2*], create the topic branch and queue the
  patches.  I may or may not test the topic in isolation at this
  point.

- I may find an updated patch series of what has been queued.  I go
  to the existing topic branch and replace it (I try to keep it
  forked at the same commit) after inspecting what got updated.
  "git tbdiff" is a useful program to help this step.  I may or may
  not test the topic in isolation at this point.

- I repeat the above two for various topics during the day, and at
  some point between 14:00-15:00 my time, stop taking new patches.
  The day's integration cycle starts.

- If there are topics that have cooked long enough in 'next' and
  planned to graduate to 'master', merge [*3*] them to 'master',
  update the draft Release notes.  Otherwise skip this step.

- If there are topics that have cooked long enough in 'pu' and
  planned to graduate to 'next', merge them to 'next'.  Otherwise
  skip this step.

- If I updated 'master', merge its tip to 'next' (this should update
  the draft release notes and nothing else, unless I took something
  directly to 'master').

- Then I recreate 'jch', which is a point between 'master' and 'pu'.
  This is the version I use for my own work, contains all topics in
  'next' but a bit more.  "git checkout -B jch master" begins it,
  and then the topics that were in 'jch' are merged on top.  The
  latest version of updated topics that were already in 'jch' are
  incorporated at this point, and "git diff jch@{20.hours}" would
  show the effect of their interdiff (plus RelNotes update, if
  'master' was updated during this integration cycle).

- I ran "git branch --no-merged pu --sort=-committerdate" to see the
  topics that are new; the top of this list shows new topics and
  updated topics (note that I just updated 'jch' but not 'pu' yet at
  this point).  Among them, I pick the ones that I am willing to be
  a guinea-pig for before they hit 'next' and merge them to 'jch'.
  Other topics that used to be in 'pu' may also be merged at this
  point, when they turn out to be 

Re: Google Doc about the Contributors' Summit

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi team,

On Thu, 2 Feb 2017, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

> I just started typing stuff up in a Google Doc, and made it editable to
> everyone, feel free to help and add things:
> 
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KDoSn4btbK5VJCVld32he29U0pUeFGhpFxyx9ZJDDB0/edit?usp=sharing

I am terribly sorry... yesterday I simply tried to restrict editing so
that nobody would just spam the document, but in my haste I even disabled
viewing.

The link is functional again, sorry for that.

Thanks, Tim, for reporting the problem!

Ciao,
Dscho

Google Doc about the Contributors' Summit

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi team,

I just started typing stuff up in a Google Doc, and made it editable to
everyone, feel free to help and add things:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KDoSn4btbK5VJCVld32he29U0pUeFGhpFxyx9ZJDDB0/edit?usp=sharing

Ciao,
Johannes