On 09/03/2014 11:57 AM, Solly Ross wrote:
I will follow up with a more detailed email about what I believe we are
missing, once the FF settles and I have applied some soothing creme to
my burnout wounds, but currently my sentiment is:
Contributing features to Nova nowadays SUCKS!!1 (even as a core
reviewer) We _have_ to change that!
I think this is *very* important.
<rant>
For instance, I have/had two patch series
up. One is of length 2 and is relatively small. It's basically sitting there
with one "+2" on each patch. I will now most likely have to apply for a FFE
to get it merged, not because there's more changes to be made before it can get
merged
(there was one small nit posted yesterday) or because it's a huge patch that
needs a lot
of time to review, but because it just took a while to get reviewed by cores,
and still only appears to have been looked at by one core.
For the other patch series (which is admittedly much bigger), it was hard just
to
get reviews (and it was something where I actually *really* wanted several
opinions,
because the patch series touched a couple of things in a very significant way).
Now, this is not my first contribution to OpenStack, or to Nova, for that
matter. I
know things don't always get in. It's frustrating, however, when it seems like
the
reason something didn't get in wasn't because it was fundamentally flawed, but
instead
because it didn't get reviews until it was too late to actually take that
feedback into
account, or because it just didn't get much attention review-wise at all. If I
were a
new contributor to Nova who had successfully gotten a major blueprint approved
and
the implemented, only to see it get rejected like this, I might get turned off
of Nova,
and go to work on one of the other OpenStack projects that seemed to move a bit
faster.
</rant>
I see that you have done 7 reviews in the past 90 days. Doing reviews on
other people's code goes a long way towards getting some "core karma".
So, it's silly to rant without actually providing any ideas on how to fix it.
One suggestion would be, for each approved blueprint, to have one or two cores
explicitly marked as being responsible for providing at least some feedback on
that patch. This proposal has issues, since we have a lot of blueprints and
only
twenty cores, who also have their own stuff to work on. However, I think the
general idea of having "guaranteed" reviewers is not unsound by itself. Perhaps
we should have a loose tier of reviewers between "core" and "everybody else".
These reviewers would be known good reviewers who would follow the
implementation
of particular blueprints if a core did not have the time. Then, when those
reviewers
gave the "+1" to all the patches in a series, they could ping a core, who could
feel
more comfortable giving a "+2" without doing a deep inspection of the code.
This is exactly the reason I believe there are so many places in Nova
that we have such an astonishing amount of technical debt. Core
reviewers are so swamped with the review load that they see +1s from
folks that they perceive to be SMEs on certain parts of the code and
give a less-than-needed-quality review of the patch and end up +2'ing it
too early.
It is *precisely* the holistic understanding of multiple parts of the
Nova codebase that is the critical piece that having 2 core reviewers
sign-off on the patch. Cores are supposed to have a good grasp of
multiple parts of the Nova subsystems and be able to tell (sometimes
instinctively, sometimes explicitly) when a patch introduces behaviour
that will incur more of the aforementioned technical debt. It is for
this reason I strongly oppose any loosening of the 2 +2s system.
That's just one suggestion, though. Whatever the solution may be, this is a
problem that we need to fix. While I enjoyed going through the blueprint
process
this cycle (not sarcastic -- I actually enjoyed the whole "structured feedback"
thing),
the follow up to that was not the most pleasant.
One final note: the specs referenced above didn't get approved until Spec
Freeze, which
seemed to leave me with less time to implement things. In fact, it seemed that
a lot
of specs didn't get approved until spec freeze. Perhaps if we had more
staggered
approval of specs, we'd have more staggered submission of patches, and thus
less of a
sudden influx of patches in the couple weeks before feature proposal freeze.
I actually think the last paragraph above contains a good suggestion.
This is, I think, similar to the "slots" approach that Joe Gordon and a
couple other folks were championing at the mid-cycle and I think has
quite a bit of merit. We need to find a way of:
* focusing reviewers more effectively
* saying "no" more often and with more specific feedback
* being more structured in the way we communicate what is being
actively reviewed and what isn't
I think the slots idea at least moves us in the proper direction
regarding the above three things.
Best,
-jay
Best Regards,
Solly Ross
----- Original Message -----
From: "Nikola Đipanov" <ndipa...@redhat.com>
To: openstack-dev@lists.openstack.org
Sent: Wednesday, September 3, 2014 5:50:09 AM
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [Nova] Feature Freeze Exception process for Juno
On 09/02/2014 09:23 PM, Michael Still wrote:
On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 1:40 PM, Nikola Đipanov <ndipa...@redhat.com> wrote:
On 09/02/2014 08:16 PM, Michael Still wrote:
Hi.
We're soon to hit feature freeze, as discussed in Thierry's recent
email. I'd like to outline the process for requesting a freeze
exception:
* your code must already be up for review
* your blueprint must have an approved spec
* you need three (3) sponsoring cores for an exception to be granted
Can core reviewers who have features up for review have this number
lowered to two (2) sponsoring cores, as they in reality then need four
(4) cores (since they themselves are one (1) core but cannot really
vote) making it an order of magnitude more difficult for them to hit
this checkbox?
That's a lot of numbers in that there paragraph.
Let me re-phrase your question... Can a core sponsor an exception they
themselves propose? I don't have a problem with someone doing that,
but you need to remember that does reduce the number of people who
have agreed to review the code for that exception.
Michael has correctly picked up on a hint of snark in my email, so let
me explain where I was going with that:
The reason many features including my own may not make the FF is not
because there was not enough buy in from the core team (let's be
completely honest - I have 3+ other core members working for the same
company that are by nature of things easier to convince), but because of
any of the following:
* Crippling technical debt in some of the key parts of the code
* that we have not been acknowledging as such for a long time
* which leads to proposed code being arbitrarily delayed once it makes
the glaring flaws in the underlying infra apparent
* and that specs process has been completely and utterly useless in
helping uncover (not that process itself is useless, it is very useful
for other things)
I am almost positive we can turn this rather dire situation around
easily in a matter of months, but we need to start doing it! It will not
happen through pinning arbitrary numbers to arbitrary processes.
I will follow up with a more detailed email about what I believe we are
missing, once the FF settles and I have applied some soothing creme to
my burnout wounds, but currently my sentiment is:
Contributing features to Nova nowadays SUCKS!!1 (even as a core
reviewer) We _have_ to change that!
N.
Michael
* exceptions must be granted before midnight, Friday this week
(September 5) UTC
* the exception is valid until midnight Friday next week
(September 12) UTC when all exceptions expire
For reference, our rc1 drops on approximately 25 September, so the
exception period needs to be short to maximise stabilization time.
John Garbutt and I will both be granting exceptions, to maximise our
timezone coverage. We will grant exceptions as they come in and gather
the required number of cores, although I have also carved some time
out in the nova IRC meeting this week for people to discuss specific
exception requests.
Michael
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