[Libreoffice] master & patch review process ...

Hi Bjoern,

        Lots of interesting ideas in your mail.

On Sun, 2011-05-22 at 04:10 +0200, Bjoern Michaelsen wrote:
> Kernel style subsystem maintainers would be great IMHO, but I had the
> feeling that there is a general opposition against a 'too branchy'
> development model.

        So - here is my problem: having -lots- of process (along with
fully-automatic, swing-gated, retro-flapped, inter-locked,
multi-stage-widgeted-foo-baas) consumes a ton of time. Our problem
currently is one of limited reviewer / mentor bandwidth ( this is a
great problem to have incidentally :-). At least, my experience of doing
this work - is that thinking and code-reading time is by far the
dominant (and un-avoidable) factor in the flow [ NB. I should think
faster of course ;-].

        Also, my experience of building master is that it is not -that- bad: by
-that- bad, I mean the pre-CWS nightmare of Hamburg times (as an
example). Of the dozen times I've pulled and updated recently - my build
has failed perhaps 5 times, of which 3+ have been simple incremental
build failures (fixed by gnumake), and another ~2 perhaps real issues,
one of which has been fixed by the next './g pull' and ... is there
really a problem here ? NB. it would really be ideal if experts whose
build breaks - try to fix the breakage as they hit it, to save others'
pain.

> So, yeah: I would love to see such a setup, but I have the feeling that
> it is a lot more work than assumed right now, which was the reason for
> my more ad-hoc proposal.

        My personal take is this:

        * process is a disease, that can easily get out of control
        * those -doing- the work, get to create their own process

        Or - put another way - I would feel 10x as happy with all these
suggestions if I though they would really fix the underlying problem:
which is one of not having enough skilled (and brave) reviewers who can
wander outside their area of expertise, and work hard to get things
included.

        A quick search for [PUSHED] on the mailing list reveals who my personal
super-stars are - that do that rather hard work. You can also (fairly
clearly) see the pattern of the dedicated SUSE resource we try to put on
this task each week.

        Can you help fix (to my mind) the real, underlying problem - of
reviewing hard patches ? My hope is with Caolan's return, things will
get better here too - we've been suffering without his review bandwidth
and expertise.

        ATB,

                Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks@novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot