CI system maintainability

[Michael Reeves]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 6:36 AM Friedrich W. H. Kossebau <kossebau at kde.org>
wrote:

> Am Donnerstag, 28. März 2019, 09:29:22 CET schrieb Kevin Ottens:
> > 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.
>

Then fix what's broken. If these projects need manditory reviews fine but
don't take a one-size-fits-all approach.

>
>
> Mandatory reviews in my experience only result in more fake reviews due to
> people pressuring each other to quickly get their simple patches reviewed,
> lowering the general quality of reviews.
> Also does the overhead reduce the number of minor improvements, where one
> (as
> qualified person) simply would have pushed in a minute a fix and get back
> to
> concentrate on the real work, instead of starting an overhead of having to
> juggle with yet another patch-under-review where the current work depends
> on.
>
> IMHO the actual problem here is: people do not do their post-push work and
> care for the state on CI.
>

Agreed.

>
> From what I saw, many breakages happened with reviewed patches. Whole
> releases even get done while CI is reporting failed builds, or at least
> lots
> of failing tests.
>

Requiring pre-commit hooks which run these could be helpful. They could
stop this at the local machine. Perhaps also a reminder to check ci. Not
sure this completely solves the issue but it would be workable for small
projects like kdiff3 and would reduce overhead for minor typo correction.

>
> I have no idea how to fix that. We would need to ask the people for whom
> this
> happens why it does happen, and how we can improve things so that CI
> checks
> become part of their workflow.
>
> Cheers
> Friedrich
>
>
>
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