On 06/24/2015 08:42 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 11:28:59AM +0100, Nikola Đipanov wrote:
Hey Nova,
I'll cut to the chase and keep this email short for brevity and clarity:
Specs don't work! They do nothing to facilitate good design happening,
if anything they prevent it. The process layered on top with only a
minority (!) of cores being able to approve them, yet they are a prereq
of getting any work done, makes sure that the absolute minimum that
people can get away with will be proposed. This in turn goes and
guarantees that no good design collaboration will happen. To add insult
to injury, Gerrit and our spec template are a horrible tool for
discussing design. Also the spec format itself works for only a small
subset of design problems Nova development is faced with.
I'd like to see some actual evidence to backup a sweeping statement
as "Specs dont work. They do nothing to facilitate good design happening,
if anything they prevent it."
Comparing Nova today, with Nova before specs were introduced, I think
that specs have had a massive positive impact on the amount of good
design and critique that is happening.
Yes, I feel the same.
When I was reviewing features in Nova before specs came along, I spent
alot of time just trying to figure out what on earth the code was
actually attempting to address, because there was rarely any statement
of the problem being addressed, or any explanation of the design that
motivated the code. This made life hard for reviewers trying to figure
out if the code was acceptable to merge. It is pretty bad for contributors
trying to implement new features too, as they could spend weeks or months
writing and submitting code, only to be rejected at the end because the
(lack of any design discussions) meant they missed some aspect of the
problem which in turn meant all their work was in vain. That was a collosal
waste of everyone's time and resulted in some of the very horrible code
impl decisions we're still living with today.
Right.
<snip>
In reviewing specs, we also often get into far too much detail about
the actual implementation, which is really counterproductive. eg when
get down to bikeshedding about the names of classes, types of object
attributes, and so forth, it is really insane. That level of detail
and bikesheeding belongs in the code review, not the design for the
most part.
While we can sometimes get a little deep in implementation details, I
have one comment about this.
Naming is *extremely* important. I know it sounds silly, but what people
name classes and modules and methods goes directly to the readability
and understandability of the code itself. I often bring up naming points
in spec reviews because I feel it forces the submitter to think through
how to explain their proposed solution to people. I know that
personally, conversations about naming things in my own submitted spec
reviews have been immensely useful. As an example recently, Alexis Lee
and Ed Leafe had some comments about how I'd named the objects in my
resource-objects spec, and although I went back and forth with Alexis on
a number of things, the end result I am confident produced objects and
methods that were named in a way that is most readable and
comprehensible to contributors.
Specs are also inflexible when it comes to dealing with features that
cross multiple projects, because we silo'd spec reviews against the
individual projects. This is sub-optimal, but ultimately not a show
stopper.
Well, we do have the openstack-specs repo for cross-project specs, but
it's not well reviewed, to be fair.
I also think the way we couple spec approval & reviews to the dev
cycles is counterproductive. We should be willing to accept and
review specs at any point in any cycle, and once approved they should
remain valid for a prolonged period of time - not require us to go
through re-review every new dev cycle as again that's just creating
extra burden. We should of course though reserve the right to unapprove
specs if circumstances change, invlidating the design for the previous
approval.
OMG, thank you SO much for bringing this up. I could not agree more with
the above paragraph. We can always amend a previously approved spec with
additional information based on followup conversations, but taking the
time to continually push new specs for review each cycle is a colossal
waste of time.
Best,
-jay
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