On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 2:34 AM, James Henstridge<[email protected]> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > Last week, a number of the Canonical Storm developers met at the > Ubuntu Developer Summit and had a few informal discussions about Storm > and how to improve the development process. Below are some of my > thoughts coming from those discussions. > > = Get More People Working on Trunk = > > If someone were to look at the revisions in Storm's trunk, they'd see > that pretty much all the recent commits come from Canonical employees. > However, if they looked at the other branches registered on > Launchpad, it is clear that there are a number of long lived feature > branches containing significant contribution from the community. The > prominent ones are: > > * twisted-integration > * Oracle support > * Microsoft SQL Server support > > While the current state of affairs might be workable for their current > users, I think it would be beneficial to try and get them merged to > trunk ASAP.
This sounds like a good idea to me. While it's "workable" to maintain two branches merged with stable, it leaves me a little on edge since the code doesn't go through the normal test and release cycle. > Some benefits of merging the branches include: > > 1. Make things easier for users who need features from more than one > of these branches. From bug and branch activity on Launchpad, it is > clear that at least one person (Drew Smathers) has been using Oracle > together with twisted-integration. > > 2. Easier handling of bug fixes. If a developer working on the Oracle > or MS-SQL branches, there is probably a temptation to fix unrelated > bugs on those feature branches since they will be immediately useful > to what they are working on. Fixing the bug on trunk would require > waiting for the fix to get merged and then attempting to merge trunk > into the feature branch. If the delta between trunk and what the > developer is working on is small, then there shouldn't be much > disadvantage to fixing things on trunk. > > 3. Easier to take advantage of features/bug fixes from trunk. This is > related to the previous one: if the branch a developer is using has > diverged significantly from trunk, then it will be difficult for them > to merge changes from trunk. > > Of course, there are some problems to overcome in merging Oracle and > MS-SQL support. I am currently able to run tests for all supported DB > backends on my machine when committing to trunk, but that will be > difficult with these two due to licensing and ties to Windows for > MS-SQL. Perhaps a buildbot instance might be the answer, if we can > get appropriate slaves set up. > I should be able to make a buildbot slave from a dev server for testing Oracle if you decide to take that route. > Another issue is test coverage for the new backends. If they don't > currently pass all the tests, might it be appropriate to merge them > anyway and work out a process where we can ratchet down the set of > failures to zero post merge? > > = Reviews = > > Changes make their way to trunk through Launchpad's code review > system. A list of branches waiting for review is available here: > > https://code.launchpad.net/storm/+activereviews > > While most review work is being done by the core Storm team at the > moment, I'd welcome others to help out. Even if you don't have a deep > knowledge of Storm, a general knowledge of Python programming can > often be enough to see things the original developer missed. > > = IRC Meetings = > > Gustavo mentioned this on the mailing list a few months back, but we > haven't actually organised it. It'd be helpful to have a regular IRC > meeting to discuss the development of Storm. I think it'd be good to > aim for a monthly meeting at least initially, but we could do it more > frequently if we feel it is necessary. > > The meeting need not be too long: if there isn't much to discuss, then > the meeting can end quickly. This would be open > > Picking a time might be a bit tricky, given that we're a > geographically dispersed team with people in America (North and > South), Europe and Australia, but hopefully we can find a time that > works. > > > Comments are welcome, as are further suggestions to improve our > development process. > > James. > > -- > storm mailing list > [email protected] > Modify settings or unsubscribe at: > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/storm > -- storm mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/storm
