Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Antoine Musso]

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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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Sumana Harihareswara]

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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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Antoine Musso]

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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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[MZMcBride]

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
? 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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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Erik Moeller]

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 3:27 PM, MZMcBride  wrote:
> I asked about this "policy" a few months ago:
> .
>
> Rob never replied and the thread died. There's a difference between having a
> page on MediaWiki.org and having a policy. From what I've seen, it's mostly
> the former, though I'd be thrilled if someone can prove me wrong.

Currently 20% is being enforced by reminders from Rob or his delegate
during the days that a person's signed up for it. It's typically going
towards code review or deployment support. When a person's not ponying
up, Rob will escalate the issue if needed. In some cases we've created
exemptions (e.g. fundraising engineering has only 2 staff right now,
so they're exempt until they get a couple more engineers on board, so
they can get any work done).

I'd love more metrics, of course. Do we have any git/gerrit metrics already?

Erik
-- 
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VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Erik Moeller]

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 8:47 PM, Tim Starling  wrote:

> Anyway, it certainly isn't the case for core contributions, or for
> contributions to existing extensions, both of which have a healthy
> level of community commits. The problem is limited to new extension
> deployments, and perhaps to major core branch merges like IWTransclusion.

I agree with this, but also with the fact that extension review is
currently broken. Part of the answer, IMO, is going to have to be to
trust more volunteers to do lots of legwork on getting extensions
ready for deployment. Part of the answer is more systematic
resourcing. Right now we're dealing with a flood of new committers
across the board (thanks to the lightweight developer access process),
so keeping up with changes to core and deployed extensions, and
getting onto a two-week deployment schedule from core, is our highest
priority internally.

Petr, regarding the extensions you're hoping will get deployed, do we
have existing test setups in labs (single-instance wiki or
deployment-prep) so we can give these more eyes from developers and
non-devs alike? If not, would you be willing to set those up?

> We're not behaving like Oracle does with Java or MySQL, or like Google
> does with Android. We develop code in public repositories and grant
> commit access liberally.

This is very true. Moreover, we're not merely shipping a software
product, but actually installing software on a top 5 web property with
a large, active and vocal community. What seems trivial is often not.
It's clear that WMF will get plenty of blame if we're seen to "ignore
consensus" or install software with unforeseen negative side effects,
so any extension, no matter how small or large, can potentially be
fairly hairy. We do want to make sure we have eyeballs not just from
devs but also from user interface/UX folks where needed.

Criticism is warranted and needed. However, I'm always interested in
seeing examples of people or organizations who do a better job at
solving the same kinds of problems. That would allow us to learn from
them, and also add weight to criticism where we're failing to do the
obvious. But mostly, these aren't obvious problems. Resourcing to
support an ever-changing firehose of suggested changes, many of which
should _not_ be made or need improvement, while also making our own
pace of continued improvements is inherently hard -- as our problems
with new editor retention in the all-volunteer editorial community
show.

Erik
-- 
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VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Antoine Musso]

Le 05/04/12 00:27, MZMcBride a écrit :
> I asked about this "policy" a few months ago:
> .
> 
> Rob never replied and the thread died. There's a difference between having a
> page on MediaWiki.org and having a policy. From what I've seen, it's mostly
> the former, though I'd be thrilled if someone can prove me wrong.

Which is an entirely different subject.  You might want to send a new
message just for that :-]  Then I will happily reply about my specific case.

-- 
Antoine "hashar" Musso


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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[K. Peachey]

2012/4/5 Petr Bena :
> I don't know if this is a part of some joke
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/LiquidThreads_3.0/status
>
> but it seems that someone wrote some code

Yes, Werdna was working on it for a bit (hes currently attached to
other WMF projects currently as to my understanding)

iirc the code he was working on is under: SVN/mediawiki/branches/.

(CC'ing Andrew, since well, we are discussing him)

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Ariel T. Glenn]

The mediawiki page is legit, although you'll notice that it's not been
updated since last October; this reflects the fact that there's not
current work going on.  The email announcement to this list was not.


Ariel

Στις 05-04-2012, ημέρα Πεμ, και ώρα 09:47 +0200, ο/η Petr Bena έγραψε:
> I don't know if this is a part of some joke
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/LiquidThreads_3.0/status
> 
> but it seems that someone wrote some code
> 
> 2012/4/5 Petr Bena :
> > This isn't true?
> >
> > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/LiquidThreads_3.0
> >
> > On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 9:40 AM, Ariel T. Glenn  wrote:
> >> *cough* LQT 3 is private because it doesn't exist... see the date of
> >> that email (hint, 1st day of April).
> >>
> >> If there were to be a project like that I expect it would be very very
> >> public indeed. ;-)
> >>
> >> Ariel
> >>
> >> Στις 05-04-2012, ημέρα Πεμ, και ώρα 09:10 +0200, ο/η Petr Bena έγραψε:
> >>> When we talk about the public code, why the development of new
> >>> software like LQT 3 is private? Why community devs can't participate
> >>> on that? When is it going to be pushed to readeable repository? I also
> >>> heard from B Harris that there is a work on new interface design,
> >>> which some code name, there is no code for it, why?
> >>>
> >>> On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 5:47 AM, Tim Starling  
> >>> wrote:
> >>> > On 04/04/12 22:58, Petr Bena wrote:
> >>> >> It should be clearly mentioned somewhere on guidelines for developers
> >>> >> that attempts to create software which is supposed to be deployed to
> >>> >> foundation sites will be likely overlooked.
> >>> >
> >>> > We don't want to document it when we don't want it to be the case.
> >>> > Documenting it would give the impression that it is an acceptable
> >>> > situation.
> >>> >
> >>> > Anyway, it certainly isn't the case for core contributions, or for
> >>> > contributions to existing extensions, both of which have a healthy
> >>> > level of community commits. The problem is limited to new extension
> >>> > deployments, and perhaps to major core branch merges like 
> >>> > IWTransclusion.
> >>> >
> >>> > We're not behaving like Oracle does with Java or MySQL, or like Google
> >>> > does with Android. We develop code in public repositories and grant
> >>> > commit access liberally.
> >>> >
> >>> > You're setting a high standard with your demands, but it happens to be
> >>> > a standard we want to meet. So please, keep nagging and watch this 
> >>> > space.
> >>> >
> >>> > -- Tim Starling
> >>> >
> >>> >
> >>> > ___
> >>> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> >>> > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> >>> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> >>>
> >>> ___
> >>> Wikitech-l mailing list
> >>> Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> >>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> ___
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Petr Bena]

I don't know if this is a part of some joke
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/LiquidThreads_3.0/status

but it seems that someone wrote some code

2012/4/5 Petr Bena :
> This isn't true?
>
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/LiquidThreads_3.0
>
> On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 9:40 AM, Ariel T. Glenn  wrote:
>> *cough* LQT 3 is private because it doesn't exist... see the date of
>> that email (hint, 1st day of April).
>>
>> If there were to be a project like that I expect it would be very very
>> public indeed. ;-)
>>
>> Ariel
>>
>> Στις 05-04-2012, ημέρα Πεμ, και ώρα 09:10 +0200, ο/η Petr Bena έγραψε:
>>> When we talk about the public code, why the development of new
>>> software like LQT 3 is private? Why community devs can't participate
>>> on that? When is it going to be pushed to readeable repository? I also
>>> heard from B Harris that there is a work on new interface design,
>>> which some code name, there is no code for it, why?
>>>
>>> On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 5:47 AM, Tim Starling  
>>> wrote:
>>> > On 04/04/12 22:58, Petr Bena wrote:
>>> >> It should be clearly mentioned somewhere on guidelines for developers
>>> >> that attempts to create software which is supposed to be deployed to
>>> >> foundation sites will be likely overlooked.
>>> >
>>> > We don't want to document it when we don't want it to be the case.
>>> > Documenting it would give the impression that it is an acceptable
>>> > situation.
>>> >
>>> > Anyway, it certainly isn't the case for core contributions, or for
>>> > contributions to existing extensions, both of which have a healthy
>>> > level of community commits. The problem is limited to new extension
>>> > deployments, and perhaps to major core branch merges like IWTransclusion.
>>> >
>>> > We're not behaving like Oracle does with Java or MySQL, or like Google
>>> > does with Android. We develop code in public repositories and grant
>>> > commit access liberally.
>>> >
>>> > You're setting a high standard with your demands, but it happens to be
>>> > a standard we want to meet. So please, keep nagging and watch this space.
>>> >
>>> > -- Tim Starling
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > ___
>>> > Wikitech-l mailing list
>>> > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>>> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>>>
>>> ___
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>>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>>
>>
>>
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Petr Bena]

This isn't true?

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/LiquidThreads_3.0

On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 9:40 AM, Ariel T. Glenn  wrote:
> *cough* LQT 3 is private because it doesn't exist... see the date of
> that email (hint, 1st day of April).
>
> If there were to be a project like that I expect it would be very very
> public indeed. ;-)
>
> Ariel
>
> Στις 05-04-2012, ημέρα Πεμ, και ώρα 09:10 +0200, ο/η Petr Bena έγραψε:
>> When we talk about the public code, why the development of new
>> software like LQT 3 is private? Why community devs can't participate
>> on that? When is it going to be pushed to readeable repository? I also
>> heard from B Harris that there is a work on new interface design,
>> which some code name, there is no code for it, why?
>>
>> On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 5:47 AM, Tim Starling  wrote:
>> > On 04/04/12 22:58, Petr Bena wrote:
>> >> It should be clearly mentioned somewhere on guidelines for developers
>> >> that attempts to create software which is supposed to be deployed to
>> >> foundation sites will be likely overlooked.
>> >
>> > We don't want to document it when we don't want it to be the case.
>> > Documenting it would give the impression that it is an acceptable
>> > situation.
>> >
>> > Anyway, it certainly isn't the case for core contributions, or for
>> > contributions to existing extensions, both of which have a healthy
>> > level of community commits. The problem is limited to new extension
>> > deployments, and perhaps to major core branch merges like IWTransclusion.
>> >
>> > We're not behaving like Oracle does with Java or MySQL, or like Google
>> > does with Android. We develop code in public repositories and grant
>> > commit access liberally.
>> >
>> > You're setting a high standard with your demands, but it happens to be
>> > a standard we want to meet. So please, keep nagging and watch this space.
>> >
>> > -- Tim Starling
>> >
>> >
>> > ___
>> > Wikitech-l mailing list
>> > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>>
>> ___
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>
>
>
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Ariel T. Glenn]

*cough* LQT 3 is private because it doesn't exist... see the date of
that email (hint, 1st day of April).  

If there were to be a project like that I expect it would be very very
public indeed. ;-)

Ariel

Στις 05-04-2012, ημέρα Πεμ, και ώρα 09:10 +0200, ο/η Petr Bena έγραψε:
> When we talk about the public code, why the development of new
> software like LQT 3 is private? Why community devs can't participate
> on that? When is it going to be pushed to readeable repository? I also
> heard from B Harris that there is a work on new interface design,
> which some code name, there is no code for it, why?
> 
> On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 5:47 AM, Tim Starling  wrote:
> > On 04/04/12 22:58, Petr Bena wrote:
> >> It should be clearly mentioned somewhere on guidelines for developers
> >> that attempts to create software which is supposed to be deployed to
> >> foundation sites will be likely overlooked.
> >
> > We don't want to document it when we don't want it to be the case.
> > Documenting it would give the impression that it is an acceptable
> > situation.
> >
> > Anyway, it certainly isn't the case for core contributions, or for
> > contributions to existing extensions, both of which have a healthy
> > level of community commits. The problem is limited to new extension
> > deployments, and perhaps to major core branch merges like IWTransclusion.
> >
> > We're not behaving like Oracle does with Java or MySQL, or like Google
> > does with Android. We develop code in public repositories and grant
> > commit access liberally.
> >
> > You're setting a high standard with your demands, but it happens to be
> > a standard we want to meet. So please, keep nagging and watch this space.
> >
> > -- Tim Starling
> >
> >
> > ___
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> 
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Petr Bena]

When we talk about the public code, why the development of new
software like LQT 3 is private? Why community devs can't participate
on that? When is it going to be pushed to readeable repository? I also
heard from B Harris that there is a work on new interface design,
which some code name, there is no code for it, why?

On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 5:47 AM, Tim Starling  wrote:
> On 04/04/12 22:58, Petr Bena wrote:
>> It should be clearly mentioned somewhere on guidelines for developers
>> that attempts to create software which is supposed to be deployed to
>> foundation sites will be likely overlooked.
>
> We don't want to document it when we don't want it to be the case.
> Documenting it would give the impression that it is an acceptable
> situation.
>
> Anyway, it certainly isn't the case for core contributions, or for
> contributions to existing extensions, both of which have a healthy
> level of community commits. The problem is limited to new extension
> deployments, and perhaps to major core branch merges like IWTransclusion.
>
> We're not behaving like Oracle does with Java or MySQL, or like Google
> does with Android. We develop code in public repositories and grant
> commit access liberally.
>
> You're setting a high standard with your demands, but it happens to be
> a standard we want to meet. So please, keep nagging and watch this space.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
>
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Tim Starling]

On 04/04/12 22:58, Petr Bena wrote:
> It should be clearly mentioned somewhere on guidelines for developers
> that attempts to create software which is supposed to be deployed to
> foundation sites will be likely overlooked.

We don't want to document it when we don't want it to be the case.
Documenting it would give the impression that it is an acceptable
situation.

Anyway, it certainly isn't the case for core contributions, or for
contributions to existing extensions, both of which have a healthy
level of community commits. The problem is limited to new extension
deployments, and perhaps to major core branch merges like IWTransclusion.

We're not behaving like Oracle does with Java or MySQL, or like Google
does with Android. We develop code in public repositories and grant
commit access liberally.

You're setting a high standard with your demands, but it happens to be
a standard we want to meet. So please, keep nagging and watch this space.

-- Tim Starling


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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[MZMcBride]

Tim Starling wrote:
> On 04/04/12 18:27, Svip wrote:
>> My NaturalLanguageList extension[1] has been queued for code review
>> since March 2010.[2]  And I still believe WMF wikis like Wiktionary
>> and Commons would greatly benefit from such an extension.  At least
>> until the Lua-wikicode thing gets worked out.
> 
> I think it's pretty likely that the Lua feature will be live before
> NaturalLanguageList gets looked at again. NaturalLanguageList was not
> sufficiently inspiring to get included in the roadmap.

Which roadmap?

> Petr Bena wrote:
>> Yes, in past it worked. I don't know what is broken now, but it
>> apparently doesn't work anymore.
> 
> WMF basically hired every MediaWiki developer with a significant
> amount of motivation and community trust, and then assigned
> interesting projects to them all. The senior developers who used to
> mentor community members and review contributed extensions now mentor
> teams of employees and review code written internally.

s/interesting //

The project needs to (purportedly) advance a keyword from the list here:
 in order to gain Wikimedia staff
time, from what I can tell.

> "20% time" is an attempt to correct broader related trends, but
> perhaps we need a more project-oriented approach within our 20% time
> policy in order to encourage mentoring and start the pipeline of
> contributed extensions moving again.

I asked about this "policy" a few months ago:
.

Rob never replied and the thread died. There's a difference between having a
page on MediaWiki.org and having a policy. From what I've seen, it's mostly
the former, though I'd be thrilled if someone can prove me wrong.

MZMcBride



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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2012/4/4 Petr Bena :
>> On 4 April 2012 14:45, Tim Starling  wrote:
>> I think it's pretty likely that the Lua feature will be live before
>> NaturalLanguageList gets looked at again. NaturalLanguageList was not
>> sufficiently inspiring to get included in the roadmap.
>>
>
> I think that the correct question is if it was inspiring for the
> community of commons wiki, which it was designed for. When someone
> spends the time working on something what is useful for users of site,
> it should be naturally interesting enough for wmf to spend their time
> to review it (someone did a work for you, and doesn't even want any
> reward for that, can you at least look on the code?)
>
> There were many complaints from side of community that wmf comes a lot
> with some stuff no one really wants or is interested in which is
> deployed no matter if it gained any consensus or not (simply - wmf
> overrides the community). Which is bit funny in this context when the
> "wanted" software made by volunteers is ignored, because it's not
> sufficiently inspiring for wmf, even if users wants it and some other
> software is deployed no matter if someone wants it.

That is quite true.

What is even crazier is that the communities deploy a lot of pretty
cool code in the form of scripts, gadgets, styles and templates,
without asking the WMF. Probably, none of it can break the cluster as
badly as bad PHP code in an extension can, but this code does have a
lot of problems - among other things, it's hard to translate, to
maintain and to port from project to project and it sometimes makes
the user experience slow because of the huge heaps of JS involved.

And nevertheless people create them and massively use them. Some
projects absorb some of it completely - see the Ref Toolbar, which has
become outrageously tightly integrated into the English Wikipedia.
Much of it would be better done as proper extensions, which would be
much easier to translate, install and maintain, but would never make
the review process.

I totally understand how hard it is, but we must at least dream about
a world in which developing and deploying extensions is as easy as
doing the same with gadgets.

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Petr Bena]

> On 4 April 2012 14:45, Tim Starling  wrote:
> I think it's pretty likely that the Lua feature will be live before
> NaturalLanguageList gets looked at again. NaturalLanguageList was not
> sufficiently inspiring to get included in the roadmap.
>

I think that the correct question is if it was inspiring for the
community of commons wiki, which it was designed for. When someone
spends the time working on something what is useful for users of site,
it should be naturally interesting enough for wmf to spend their time
to review it (someone did a work for you, and doesn't even want any
reward for that, can you at least look on the code?)

There were many complaints from side of community that wmf comes a lot
with some stuff no one really wants or is interested in which is
deployed no matter if it gained any consensus or not (simply - wmf
overrides the community). Which is bit funny in this context when the
"wanted" software made by volunteers is ignored, because it's not
sufficiently inspiring for wmf, even if users wants it and some other
software is deployed no matter if someone wants it.

I am wondering what makes the software "inspiring enough" to be deployed.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Jeroen De Dauw]

Hey,

> On 4 April 2012 14:45, Tim Starling  wrote:
> I think it's pretty likely that the Lua feature will be live before
NaturalLanguageList gets looked at again. NaturalLanguageList was not
sufficiently inspiring to get included in the roadmap.

I don't know about this particular extension and do not with the comment on
it, but rather on the general notion of being "sufficiently inspiring". If
a particular piece of code is or is not obviously depends on who you ask.
Since CR is managed by WMF staff, it needs to be directly useful to WMF for
review resources to be allocated. That might not be the official standpoint
on it, but is what is happening as far as I can tell. So WMF is put before
MediaWiki itself. I think this is bad for the community and blocks certain
kinds of innovation to the software.

I do not know how to improve the situation, but think it's important to
acknowledge it (which many staff do not seem to do) as a first step.

Cheers

--
Jeroen De Dauw
http://www.bn2vs.com
Don't panic. Don't be evil.
--
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Sumana Harihareswara]

Petr:

My sympathies on the frustration.  First I'm going to talk about the
problem in general, then about your issue.

Yes, the Wikimedia community is too slow to review contributions in
general.  The experienced developers who could do code review include
many people who don't work for the Wikimedia Foundation, but many of
them don't review patches or extensions, because they prefer to write
code or don't have time for MediaWiki at all.

Reviewing code is hard and tedious.  It requires more skill than writing
code does, more knowledge of MediaWiki internals and of Wikimedia site
architecture, and most developers just don't think they're skilled
enough to do it.

Things we're doing to try to fix this:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_review_management As Tim mentioned,
WMF engineers are supposed to spend about 20% of their work time on
tasks that serve the Wikimedia community, such as review of volunteers'
contributions.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_20%25_policy has
the details.  For the past several months, the most urgent need has been
reviewing individual revisions submitted through the source control
system, to get that backlog down so we could deploy 1.19.  We have
indeed done that.  Rob Lanphier leads prioritization of 20% time so I'll
wait for his input on whether it's feasible to switch priorities to
extension review.  The trade-off is that this would lead to an increase
in our general Gerrit backlog and probably an increase in the number of
patches in Bugzilla awaiting review (currently 177 for MediaWiki core +
WMF-deployed extensions).

As Bugmeister, Mark Hershberger has been championing the review and
deployment of extensions in the review queue, such as the ShortURL
extension, but of course hasn't had time to concentrate on that
recently, given the urgent demands of the incoming bugs and of the
MediaWiki 1.19 deployment and release.

I reach out personally to ask experienced MediaWiki developers to review
patches that have been submitted in Bugzilla.  This has mixed results
and costs so much time (for me) per patch that it simply can't scale up
to the 150+ patches awaiting review.  To address this, Mark is working
on turning every patch in Bugzilla into a branch that gets submitted
into Gerrit.  That way automated tests will get run against those
patches (to reduce the amount of work human reviewers have to do), and
they'll be in the usual code review workflow.

To teach and encourage developers to do more code review and extension
review, we have led two code review trainings
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_review_management/Aug_2011_training
and
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_review_management/July_2011_training
and improved our code review documents
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_review_guide .  I also personally
reach out to strong developers to ask them if they'd like to be mentored
to improve their code review skills.  I don't know whether these have
been effective.  Maybe this thread will awaken a desire among other
developers to help out by taking a look at these extensions and giving
useful criticism.

Now, about your situation specifically:

In the extension review queue
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Review_queue I see one extension that's
labeled (on its extension page) as authored by you, OnlineStatusBar.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OnlineStatusBar  When I look at
the bug that's tracking its review,
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32128 , I see that Timo
wants to review the extension thoroughly but hasn't yet; I'll poke him
about that.  What's the other extension?

You mentioned that there should be better guidelines.  I think
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Writing_an_extension_for_deployment is
fairly comprehensive about the process except that it doesn't give any
guidelines regarding time.  Where were you looking for information about
this process?  Go ahead and link to this document there.

-- 
Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Petr Bena]

That's probably not exactly what I wanted to say:

MediaWiki is clearly still open source at some point, as long as
people (strangers / not just employees) are allowed to commit to
repository. But the wikimedia project and site is not really that
open, since people aren't allowed to submit any software improvements
/ changes (ok they are allowed to submit them, but will be ignored),
as long as they are not employees of foundation. It makes a lot of
sense, and is definitely more secure for website itself, but it's very
misleading how the developer manuals on mediawiki site suggests that
it's even possible.

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 2:58 PM, Petr Bena  wrote:
> Hi Tim,
>
> So that's exactly how I understand it. All programmers who seemed to
> be good enough were hired and now work as employees, while people who
> are working on their own have low priority (simply are ignored).
> That's why I say this philosophy kills the idea of open source, while
> it's surely good for foundation itself.
>
> There might be people who already have some work, don't wish to be
> employed by foundation (but want to help with the project, even if
> they are strange enough they don't demand money for that) or are just
> not good enough to be hired, it's clearly easier for foundation to
> assign interesting projects to paid staff and ignore the "newbies who
> could break things or strangers from internet who seems to know some
> stuff, but could break stuff as well as long as they are just some
> strangers who no one really knows, therefore it's hard to rely on
> them". In fact I don't disagree with this (I work in business
> environment and understand this philosophy), I am just trying to say
> that it turns mediawiki to product of "WMF company" from open source
> software driven by volunteers which it was in past.
>
> It should be clearly mentioned somewhere on guidelines for developers
> that attempts to create software which is supposed to be deployed to
> foundation sites will be likely overlooked.
>
> On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 2:45 PM, Tim Starling  wrote:
>> On 04/04/12 18:27, Svip wrote:
>>> My NaturalLanguageList extension[1] has been queued for code review
>>> since March 2010.[2]  And I still believe WMF wikis like Wiktionary
>>> and Commons would greatly benefit from such an extension.  At least
>>> until the Lua-wikicode thing gets worked out.
>>
>> I think it's pretty likely that the Lua feature will be live before
>> NaturalLanguageList gets looked at again. NaturalLanguageList was not
>> sufficiently inspiring to get included in the roadmap.
>>
>> On 04/04/12 19:06, 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".
>>
>> Larger things with more benefits tend to get a higher priority than
>> smaller things. So it's usually quicker to get 1500 lines of code
>> reviewed than 15.
>>
>> In another post:
>>> Yes, in past it worked. I don't know what is broken now, but it
>>> apparently doesn't work anymore.
>>
>> WMF basically hired every MediaWiki developer with a significant
>> amount of motivation and community trust, and then assigned
>> interesting projects to them all. The senior developers who used to
>> mentor community members and review contributed extensions now mentor
>> teams of employees and review code written internally.
>>
>> "20% time" is an attempt to correct broader related trends, but
>> perhaps we need a more project-oriented approach within our 20% time
>> policy in order to encourage mentoring and start the pipeline of
>> contributed extensions moving again.
>>
>> Personally, I've found it difficult to find the time and motivation to
>> bring projects such as VipsScaler and the Score extension through to
>> completion, even though I'm invested in them and personally care very
>> much about the problems they address.
>>
>> -- Tim Starling
>>
>>
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Petr Bena]

Hi Tim,

So that's exactly how I understand it. All programmers who seemed to
be good enough were hired and now work as employees, while people who
are working on their own have low priority (simply are ignored).
That's why I say this philosophy kills the idea of open source, while
it's surely good for foundation itself.

There might be people who already have some work, don't wish to be
employed by foundation (but want to help with the project, even if
they are strange enough they don't demand money for that) or are just
not good enough to be hired, it's clearly easier for foundation to
assign interesting projects to paid staff and ignore the "newbies who
could break things or strangers from internet who seems to know some
stuff, but could break stuff as well as long as they are just some
strangers who no one really knows, therefore it's hard to rely on
them". In fact I don't disagree with this (I work in business
environment and understand this philosophy), I am just trying to say
that it turns mediawiki to product of "WMF company" from open source
software driven by volunteers which it was in past.

It should be clearly mentioned somewhere on guidelines for developers
that attempts to create software which is supposed to be deployed to
foundation sites will be likely overlooked.

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 2:45 PM, Tim Starling  wrote:
> On 04/04/12 18:27, Svip wrote:
>> My NaturalLanguageList extension[1] has been queued for code review
>> since March 2010.[2]  And I still believe WMF wikis like Wiktionary
>> and Commons would greatly benefit from such an extension.  At least
>> until the Lua-wikicode thing gets worked out.
>
> I think it's pretty likely that the Lua feature will be live before
> NaturalLanguageList gets looked at again. NaturalLanguageList was not
> sufficiently inspiring to get included in the roadmap.
>
> On 04/04/12 19:06, 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".
>
> Larger things with more benefits tend to get a higher priority than
> smaller things. So it's usually quicker to get 1500 lines of code
> reviewed than 15.
>
> In another post:
>> Yes, in past it worked. I don't know what is broken now, but it
>> apparently doesn't work anymore.
>
> WMF basically hired every MediaWiki developer with a significant
> amount of motivation and community trust, and then assigned
> interesting projects to them all. The senior developers who used to
> mentor community members and review contributed extensions now mentor
> teams of employees and review code written internally.
>
> "20% time" is an attempt to correct broader related trends, but
> perhaps we need a more project-oriented approach within our 20% time
> policy in order to encourage mentoring and start the pipeline of
> contributed extensions moving again.
>
> Personally, I've found it difficult to find the time and motivation to
> bring projects such as VipsScaler and the Score extension through to
> completion, even though I'm invested in them and personally care very
> much about the problems they address.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
>
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Tim Starling]

On 04/04/12 18:27, Svip wrote:
> My NaturalLanguageList extension[1] has been queued for code review
> since March 2010.[2]  And I still believe WMF wikis like Wiktionary
> and Commons would greatly benefit from such an extension.  At least
> until the Lua-wikicode thing gets worked out.

I think it's pretty likely that the Lua feature will be live before
NaturalLanguageList gets looked at again. NaturalLanguageList was not
sufficiently inspiring to get included in the roadmap.

On 04/04/12 19:06, 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".

Larger things with more benefits tend to get a higher priority than
smaller things. So it's usually quicker to get 1500 lines of code
reviewed than 15.

In another post:
> Yes, in past it worked. I don't know what is broken now, but it
> apparently doesn't work anymore.

WMF basically hired every MediaWiki developer with a significant
amount of motivation and community trust, and then assigned
interesting projects to them all. The senior developers who used to
mentor community members and review contributed extensions now mentor
teams of employees and review code written internally.

"20% time" is an attempt to correct broader related trends, but
perhaps we need a more project-oriented approach within our 20% time
policy in order to encourage mentoring and start the pipeline of
contributed extensions moving again.

Personally, I've found it difficult to find the time and motivation to
bring projects such as VipsScaler and the Score extension through to
completion, even though I'm invested in them and personally care very
much about the problems they address.

-- Tim Starling


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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Petr Bena]

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.

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 10:54 AM, Petr Bena  wrote:
> Yes, in past it worked. I don't know what is broken now, but it
> apparently doesn't work anymore.
>
> On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 10:46 AM, Amir E. Aharoni
>  wrote:
>> 2012/4/4 Petr Bena :
>>> I understand it, that only employees of the foundation are actually
>>> permitted to write the code which is going to be deployed to wmf
>>> sites. If that is true, it should be noted somewhere, so that
>>> volunteers (the people who aren't employees / paid for that) can know
>>> that spending time on creating such an extensions, will likely result
>>> in it never going to be implemented, thus it's not anything they are
>>> suggested to do.
>>
>> This is not correct - extensions by volunteers are deployed. To cite
>> just two notable examples, Cite and CategoryTree. AFAIK, neither Ævar
>> nor Daniel are or were paid by the WMF; Daniel works at WM-DE, but
>> that's a separate organization.
>>
>> That said, better documentation about the Foundation's process for
>> deciding what is deployed would be quite useful.
>>
>> --
>> Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
>> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
>> ‪“We're living in pieces,
>> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
>>
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Petr Bena]

Yes, in past it worked. I don't know what is broken now, but it
apparently doesn't work anymore.

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 10:46 AM, Amir E. Aharoni
 wrote:
> 2012/4/4 Petr Bena :
>> I understand it, that only employees of the foundation are actually
>> permitted to write the code which is going to be deployed to wmf
>> sites. If that is true, it should be noted somewhere, so that
>> volunteers (the people who aren't employees / paid for that) can know
>> that spending time on creating such an extensions, will likely result
>> in it never going to be implemented, thus it's not anything they are
>> suggested to do.
>
> This is not correct - extensions by volunteers are deployed. To cite
> just two notable examples, Cite and CategoryTree. AFAIK, neither Ævar
> nor Daniel are or were paid by the WMF; Daniel works at WM-DE, but
> that's a separate organization.
>
> That said, better documentation about the Foundation's process for
> deciding what is deployed would be quite useful.
>
> --
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> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> ‪“We're living in pieces,
> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
>
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Petr Bena]

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 10:46 AM, K. Peachey  wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Petr Bena  wrote:
>> I started working on two extensions in October, more than 6 months
>> ago. Both were approved by community on Village Pump and it was agreed
>> to deploy them to english wikipedia. One of the extension had hundreds
>> of lines and is considered as "bigger", the other one consist of +- 15
>> lines of code, which was developed together with Ian Baker who is
>> employee of the wikimedia foundation.
>
>> I was told that in order to
>> deploy it, I need to pass code review. I requested code review many
>> times on many places and although it was more than 6 months ago, no
>> one seemed to be able to review these 15 lines of code so far
>
> Who? Where?, Have you tried asking Tim or Roan on IRC?.
>

Yes, many times

I asked on irc so many times I stopped counting, I created few
bugzilla tickets, informed many developers who are working for wmf,
and Mark Hershberger (I think there are many more who knew about it)

>
>> I understand it, that only employees of the foundation are actually
>> permitted to write the code which is going to be deployed to wmf
>> sites.
>
> No, Everyone is. Just everything requires review before being pushed
> to the site and there is a smaller pool of those compared to those
> commit code (thus, Backlogs can occur). Since general MW code is
> reviewed by many eyes (Since its generally used by more people)
> compared to extensions which generally aren't reviewed as much in our
> normal code review process.
>

Review takes so long that until it actually happen, the extension may
not be needed anymore (read the first response - 2 years waiting for
review and now it seems that a new technology will be implemented
which may do similar stuff as extension itself)

>> If that is true, it should be noted somewhere, so that
>> volunteers (the people who aren't employees / paid for that) can know
>> that spending time on creating such an extensions, will likely result
>> in it never going to be implemented, thus it's not anything they are
>> suggested to do.
>>
>> While this is secure for the foundation, so that it can actually have
>> perfect control over the code which is wikimedia running on, it is
>> sort of against the idea of open software.
>
> If that was the case, Half (by a small guess) of MediaWiki wouldn't exist.
>
> Some extensions that come to mind (Attached names are rough memory)
>
> * E:WikimediaIncubator - SQRobin
> * E:APISandbox - MaxSem (before he was a contractor)
> * E:AssertEdit - sanbeg
> * E:CategoryTree - Daniel K (i'm fairly certain, but not postive)
> * E:CLDR - Niklas iirc
> * E:ContactPage - Daniel K
>
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Extensions_used_on_Wikimedia
> will find you otheres I'm sure.
>

I don't say it didn't work in past, I say it's broken right now.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2012/4/4 Petr Bena :
> I understand it, that only employees of the foundation are actually
> permitted to write the code which is going to be deployed to wmf
> sites. If that is true, it should be noted somewhere, so that
> volunteers (the people who aren't employees / paid for that) can know
> that spending time on creating such an extensions, will likely result
> in it never going to be implemented, thus it's not anything they are
> suggested to do.

This is not correct - extensions by volunteers are deployed. To cite
just two notable examples, Cite and CategoryTree. AFAIK, neither Ævar
nor Daniel are or were paid by the WMF; Daniel works at WM-DE, but
that's a separate organization.

That said, better documentation about the Foundation's process for
deciding what is deployed would be quite useful.

--
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http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[K. Peachey]

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Petr Bena  wrote:
> I started working on two extensions in October, more than 6 months
> ago. Both were approved by community on Village Pump and it was agreed
> to deploy them to english wikipedia. One of the extension had hundreds
> of lines and is considered as "bigger", the other one consist of +- 15
> lines of code, which was developed together with Ian Baker who is
> employee of the wikimedia foundation.

> I was told that in order to
> deploy it, I need to pass code review. I requested code review many
> times on many places and although it was more than 6 months ago, no
> one seemed to be able to review these 15 lines of code so far

Who? Where?, Have you tried asking Tim or Roan on IRC?.


> I understand it, that only employees of the foundation are actually
> permitted to write the code which is going to be deployed to wmf
> sites.

No, Everyone is. Just everything requires review before being pushed
to the site and there is a smaller pool of those compared to those
commit code (thus, Backlogs can occur). Since general MW code is
reviewed by many eyes (Since its generally used by more people)
compared to extensions which generally aren't reviewed as much in our
normal code review process.

> If that is true, it should be noted somewhere, so that
> volunteers (the people who aren't employees / paid for that) can know
> that spending time on creating such an extensions, will likely result
> in it never going to be implemented, thus it's not anything they are
> suggested to do.
>
> While this is secure for the foundation, so that it can actually have
> perfect control over the code which is wikimedia running on, it is
> sort of against the idea of open software.

If that was the case, Half (by a small guess) of MediaWiki wouldn't exist.

Some extensions that come to mind (Attached names are rough memory)

* E:WikimediaIncubator - SQRobin
* E:APISandbox - MaxSem (before he was a contractor)
* E:AssertEdit - sanbeg
* E:CategoryTree - Daniel K (i'm fairly certain, but not postive)
* E:CLDR - Niklas iirc
* E:ContactPage - Daniel K

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Extensions_used_on_Wikimedia
will find you otheres I'm sure.


(CCing Tim/Roan since I mentioned their names, In the style I did).

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member)

[Svip]

On 4 April 2012 10:19, Petr Bena  wrote:

> I am very disappointed by current development process we have on
> wikimedia project. The wikimedia project itself is classified as open
> source at some point, but the current development process sort of
> beats the purpose of that.
>
> I started working on two extensions in October, more than 6 months
> ago. Both were approved by community on Village Pump and it was agreed
> to deploy them to english wikipedia. One of the extension had hundreds
> of lines and is considered as "bigger", the other one consist of +- 15
> lines of code, which was developed together with Ian Baker who is
> employee of the wikimedia foundation. I was told that in order to
> deploy it, I need to pass code review. I requested code review many
> times on many places and although it was more than 6 months ago, no
> one seemed to be able to review these 15 lines of code so far, despite
> the community agreed with the idea of extension.
>
> I understand it, that only employees of the foundation are actually
> permitted to write the code which is going to be deployed to wmf
> sites. If that is true, it should be noted somewhere, so that
> volunteers (the people who aren't employees / paid for that) can know
> that spending time on creating such an extensions, will likely result
> in it never going to be implemented, thus it's not anything they are
> suggested to do.
>
> While this is secure for the foundation, so that it can actually have
> perfect control over the code which is wikimedia running on, it is
> sort of against the idea of open software.
>
> So, it should be either described how this works, because if what I
> just said is true (I hope it's not) it should be definitely somewhere
> noted, to avoid getting more volunteers spending time on pointless
> work, or the development process should be completely changed so that
> it allows this "open source" project, to be actually open.

My NaturalLanguageList extension[1] has been queued for code review
since March 2010.[2]  And I still believe WMF wikis like Wiktionary
and Commons would greatly benefit from such an extension.  At least
until the Lua-wikicode thing gets worked out.

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:NaturalLanguageList
[2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22928

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