Plasma Team Communication & Development Practices [MUST READ]

[Martin Flöser]

Am 2017-10-07 11:22, schrieb Ben Cooksley:
> *Pulls up a chair*
> 
> We need to have a talk. The way things are proceeding currently in
> regards to how you (the Plasma folks) work with the rest of us is
> severely and fundamentally broken. Which means we need to fix it.
> 
> Lets start with development practices. Over the past few weeks, there
> have been at least two instances where things have been unbuildable,
> for several days, and have only been fixed after i've essentially
> hunted down the responsible developers. One instance is currently
> outstanding.
> 
> In one case code was introduced which depended on a new version than
> was allowed. The other case was a failure to update the dependency
> metadata.

Having had to do it a few times, I do not think there is currently a 
workflow in place where one can follow it. It's not documented and if 
one actively asks for "what's on the CI system" one gets a reply like 
"it depends" up to "look through the jobs". Having done this a few times 
I don't think you can expect developers to get this right.

If I would have to do it right now, I would not:
  * know where to find the documentation
  * know where to check which dependencies are available

So let's try to google: "kde developer update dependency", hmm nothing 
on first side, sorry.

And I'm probably the one developer being most aware of it due to the 
mess with xkbcommon.

> 
> Some might say these issues are minor. Apart from the fact they're in
> Frameworks which means they have repercussions on everyone else who
> develops software using KDE Technology. The fact they've also been
> ignored for *days* is also not great either.
> 
> Now on to communication. As above I mentioned developers were
> ignoring, or otherwise failing to take action on, notices that these
> breakages were present in the above. Not cool!!

I hear of these issue for the first time. So where were the alarm clock 
raised?

A few personal thoughts now: we have a few things which currently just 
don't work yet:
  * phabricator spams one with notifications, it's impossible to follow 
on them
  * build.kde.org is way too unreliable to follow it

The latter point shouldn't be a surprise to you as I have been in 
contact with you about the issues with KWin since the switch to the new 
CI system. I have a personal view with all the projects I monitor, just 
right now there are 7 projects marked as yellow and one as red (33 % of 
all jobs). This has been like that since the switch to the new CI. It 
became better KWin/Suse is no longer failing that often

Don't expect any one to look at it, if it is unreliable. A CI system is 
great to find that things break, but not so much if it is unreliable.

> 
> We also had an issue recently where a project which had asked to be
> incubated nearly ended up slipping through the cracks, had I not
> pinged a Sysadmin ticket they had opened earlier about the whole
> thing.

This sounds exactly like the phabricator notification issue. I currently 
have > 1400 notifications. I constantly miss reviews due to that. I 
could mark all as read and then wait a day and we are > 100 again.

> 
> Given one of the things we want to improve is new contributor
> onboarding, this isn't a good look.
> 
> Do you have any ideas on how we might fix this?

Personally I think it's a tooling problem. I fear the activity of Plasma 
is too large for phabricator. I'm not a phabricator expert so I don't 
know how to reduce the notifications. Especially as it's duplicated, we 
also get everything on the mailing lists.

Cheers
Martin