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
