Re: CommitFest July Over

On Monday 04 August 2008 15:38:35 Josh Berkus wrote:
> Hackers,
>
> Well, after a month the July CommitFest is officially closed. At this
> point, we're operating with the defacto rule that commitfests shouldn't
> last more than a month.
>
> Because some patches are still being discussed, they've been moved over
> automatically to the September commitfest. A much large number of
> patches are now in "returned with feedback"; if your patch is in there,
> probably hackers is waiting for some kind of response from you.
>

People should understand they don't have to wait for a commitfest to continue
development, right? (Ie. if your patch got rejected, start getting it in
shape now, and ask questions now)

> Lots of stuff was committed, too. 8.4 is looking very exciting.
>

+1

> Post-mortem things we've learned about the commitfest are:
>
> 1) It's hard to get anything done in June-July.
>

True... vacations and conferences abound. September should be better in this
regard I would think.

> 2) The number of patches is going to keep increasing with each
> commitfest. As such, the patch list is going to get harder to deal
> with. We now urgently need to start working on CF management software.
>
> 3) Round Robin Reviewers didn't really work this time, aside from
> champion new reviewer Abhjit. For the most part, RRR who were assigned
> patches did not review them for 2 weeks. Two areas where this concept
> needs to be improved:
> a) we need to assign RRR to patches two days after the start of
> commitfest, not a week later;

This seems tricky, since you want people to volunteer to review patches
ideally, will two days be enough? Should people interested in reviewing be
signing up ahead of time? Looking at the next commitfest, it is going to
start on a Monday... maybe auto-assigning reviewers on Wednesday is OK.

> b) there needs to be the expectation that RRR will start reviewing or
> reject the assignment immediately.
>

I wonder if too much time was spent on patches like the WITH patch, which
seemed pretty early on it was not ready for commit... thoughts?

> 4) We need to work better to train up new reviewers. Some major
> committer(s) should have worked with Abhjit, Thomas and Martin
> particularly on getting them to effectively review patches; instead,
> committers just handled stuff *for* them for the most part, which isn't
> growing our pool of reviewers.
>
> 5) Patch submitters need to understand that patch submission isn't
> fire-and-forget. They need to check back, and respond to queries from
> reviewers. Of course, a patch-tracker which automatically notified the
> submitter would help.
>

Reviewers should be responding to the email on -hackers that is pointed to by
the wiki, so patch submitters should be getting notified... right ?

> 6) Overall, I took a low-nag-factor approach to the first time as
> commitfest manager. This does not seem to have been the best way; I'd
> suggest for september that the manager make more frequent nags.
>

Is there something you want people to nag people about?

> Finally: who wants to be CF Manager for September? I'm willing to do it
> again, but maybe someone else should get a turn.
>

Why stop now when you've got the momentum? :-)

Seriously though, I thought we were supposed to have 2 people working as CF
Managers for each CF... is that not the case?

--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter LAMP :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL