CI system maintainability

[David Jarvie]

On 28 March 2019 13:33:59 GMT, laurent Montel <montel at kde.org> wrote:
> Le jeudi 28 mars 2019, 09:29:22 CET Kevin Ottens a écrit :
> > Hello,
> > 
> > On Thursday, 28 March 2019 09:16:11 CET Ben Cooksley wrote:
> > > Please note that the commits in this instance were pushed without
> > > review, so restrictions on merge requests wouldn't make a
> difference
> > > in this case unfortunately.
> > 
> > Maybe it's about time to make reviews mandatory... I know it's
> unpopular in
> > KDE, and I advocated for "don't force a tool if you can get someone
> to look
> > at your screen or pair with you" in the past. Clearly this
> compromise gets
> > somewhat exploited and that's especially bad in the case of a
> fragile and
> > central component like KDE PIM.
> > 
> > Regards.
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I am against to force mandatory review, as it will create a lot of
> lose of 
> time, and we will not be sure that review is correct (see comment from
> Volker 
> about "transaction lock regression")
> 
> It's necessary to having a big team for doing it.
> 
> Ok a repo was broken, but it was just that fix was created in master
> not 
> 19.04, I didn't see nobody on IRC told us "this package is always
> broken", 
> when I saw it this morning I just cherry pick (2 seconds for fixing
> it).
> 
> 
> For example I works all days on kde (pim or other) when I wake up, or
> at noon 
> after my lunch or the evening, I will not wait several days for a
> review 
> because nobody has time to do it. (we can see a review from zanshin
> for 
> example https://phabricator.kde.org/D16210 we can see that David
> waited 2 
> months until having an answer...).
> 
> (For example I make ~ 15 commits by days on pim/ruqola/framework, I
> don't want 
> to wait several days/weeks until someone wants to review my patchs)
> 
> I will not lose my time to review some code that I don't understand...
> I never 
> reviewed Akonadi patch as I don't understand this code, and I will
> take time 
> on it just for the pleasure as I prefer fixing bug or adding new
> features in 
> components that I maintain.
> 
> When we have a big team as Qt team it can help but in pim component
> where we 
> don't have any redundant guy, we will lose a lot of time.
> 
> So for each increase version for each package I will wait a review.
> For sure 
> not.
> 
> Each time that I will improve code as coding style I will wait that
> someone 
> wants to review...

I agree. Mandatory reviews might work if there is a team of active people working on a project, but if there is only one person with real knowledge of the code, or there is nobody else with much time to spare, who is going to do the review? It is likely to just sit waiting indefinitely. If getting code reviewed is too difficult, the developer may have to give up and abandon the project.

Mandatory reviewing could only work if individual projects can decide whether to adopt it or not.

--
David Jarvie
KAlarm author, KDE developer
http://www.astrojar.org.uk/kalarm