Re: Advancing to Patch::review

[James]

Hello,

On 02/12/2020 20:57, Michael Käppler wrote:
> Am 02.12.2020 um 18:16 schrieb Jonas Hahnfeld:
>
> [snip]
> > Circling back to my original proposal:
> > > My gut feeling is that this should be somebody else than the MR author
> > Do I interpret your actions that you disagree with this? To elaborate a
> > bit, this tries to keep the pleasant effect that somebody else at least
> > opens your MR and nobody is tempted to change labels because "I'm sure
> > this will pass testing".
> Well, I agree that it is better to have at least four eyes look at the
> test results,
> but since you wrote "You're not sold on this" I thought it would be okay
> for you if I check the tests myself.  I did not include visual
> screenshots, sorry for that.
>
> Do you have any other 'actions' in mind? I assume that checking the 
> results
> for !533 and setting it to 'review' was ok?
>
> If we decide to have the policy "Do not set your own MRs to 'review'",
> I'm also
> fine with that. OTOH, I would also trust the developers that they do not
> set MRs to 'review' without looking at the tests.
>
> I'm not sure, however, if it does work well to distribute the job of 
> setting
> patches from 'new' to 'review', because the frequency of somebody
> 'passing by'
> can vary to a great extent and sometimes shared responsibility is
> noone's responsibility :)

Yes the classic 'Bystander Effect' problem.

> James, what is your opinion on that? Would you still be willing to do
> this job?


Testing Patches was always orthogonal to managing the countdown (which 
was the original point of the 'Patch Meister' role).

I only fell into the testing patches because at the time we had limited 
resources (hardware was not what it is now) and only a few really active 
LP dev team members. We were missing a lot of fly-by patches, and some 
patches were being left to 'die' because no one was reviewing them. I 
was already doing doc patches and didn't mind stepping in to help the LP 
team with the testing. The countdown was being done by another volunteer 
at the time and I only took that on because he decided he didn't want to 
do it any more and left. I was worried that we'd lose patches or the 
current devs would not want to be bothered with the managing of all 
these disparate diff files and git-formatted patches flying about in 
emails and in reitveld.

So I ended up with two roles. Testing and Patch Meister.

'Meistering' patches is trivial because I can do it in a few minutes and 
on a regular schedule (more or less) and this seems to be working OK - I 
have no 'skin' in the game as I am not a developer and I hope I bring a 
sense of fairness to the countdown for patches that are more contentious 
than others.

As for Testing?

I am more than happy to 'let go' of the Patch testing frankly, I don't 
mind doing it, but it does seem silly that this should not be fully 
automated now.

Also I still have to 'look' at the MR for the countdown process, and if 
somehow we could post the 'URL link' for the diff in the MR thread 
automatically (rather than go and hunt around for it by clicking icons 
etc) then that would remove a lot of friction but I think that is not 
easy/possible to do.

I also realise that reg tests are critical to what LP stands for and we 
do need that human eye on them, but even so... I think we should see how 
it goes (i.e. fully automated and any other dev can check the diff from 
now) and trust that the devs will not abuse the system and actually 
check something than just move on the patch. But as far as I understand 
it the make-check passing will put the review label on the MR right?

Perhaps we need to add a 'step' before we release a new version to the 
world, by running a full reg test suite and posting it somewhere - I 
seem to recall that we used to do that in the past, I think Phil had 
some hacked script he did on his own website that showed diffs between 
various significant versions. Is something we could do - I don't know 
enough about what we can and cannot do in Gitlab that we could 'post' 
somewhere or even view in the repo (even if it was binary output like a 
PDF)?

James



> Cheers,
> Michael