Developer meeting November 2010

Developer meetings > November 2010 meeting

The meeting was at 07:00 UTC on Thursday, 25 November 2010. We had 37 participants and we covered everything in around 1½ hours.

• Recording of the meeting (login as a guest by providing your email address, name and session password moodle)
• Meeting notes (developer chat history only available to developers with CVS write access)

Meeting participants, if anything we discussed has been been missed out, please edit the page and add it!

Moodle 2.0 release

Martin said it was good to have the Moodle 2.0 release as a milestone. We won't branch for a while yet but will work on refining 2.0. Not branching makes things easier for migration to git. We won't be working much more with 1.8, just security fixes.

Moving to git

Martin described how there have been good discussions in HQ about processes and how we can go forward. We will be switching completely to git as primary repository, CVS will be a mirror, people using CVS to update their sites won't notice anything, only devs will notice. Not sure of timing of switch yet, will have a lot more control over checkins, much more defined process with more reviewing.

• Development:Process
• Development:Git Migration

Git Migration Concerns

There has been some discussion in the developer chat room about potential git workflows. Some immediate concerns about a workflow:

• Slow moving reviews. Especially for lesser known contributors, git makes reviewing and 'commiting' as an external contributor much easier, but code reviews are a social rather than technical problem. Time needs to be allocated to 'coaching' people who don't make the cut. The code review structure needs to be such that the top doesn't become a bottleneck.

• Multiple ineffective sign-off levels. There is no point jumping through multiple levels of code review if its not done effectively. (Upon writing this I realise we need to just try it and make sure it doesn't become like this, rather than expecting it to fail--Dan Poltawski 09:34, 23 November 2010 (UTC)).

• How to manage the code-review 'work-stack'? If there is a list of 'merge requests'? If we continue to use the tracker for this we're likely to get the problem of 'lost patches' sitting in bugs which have never been looked at by a core contributor.

• Loss of 'kudos' for existing commiters. Like it or not, some respect comes with commit access. This can be replaced by reviewing roles having a place in the code review 'tree'.
  • We can use this to ensure better code review happens though. If i'm a mid-level reviewer, I would want to improve my kudos by only letting good stuff through ;-)
  • Please note git supports both Committer: and Author: field for each commit. So we can easily to respect original author of the patch. --David Mudrak 13:08, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
    • Perhaps the solution to the original question is a general rule that nobody should commit their own work. The credit goes to the author (which would encourage more contributions) and a workflow would need to be developed that would ensure quick review when appropriate. The list of "Moodle Developers" would be those who have authored code that is committed (perhaps with an indication of the number of contributions to distinguish major developers). --Gary Anderson 19:19, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
    • Sorry, the problem is not that there is lack of credit, in fact its much better in git than CVS, as the original author should be retained (so new contributors get credit from the start). The problem is instead of 'established contributors' who currently have 'kudos' in the form of commit access. This will be lost, and I think there is still a place for such kudos (in the form of reviewer roles, perhaps). --Dan Poltawski 20:16, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
    • In addition to having other roles like reviewer, etc. we could use something like the Linux kernel 'tag lines' (see http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/SubmittingPatches sections 12-14). Then we could update moodle.org "bagdes" dynamically, like we currently do for particularly helpful moodlers, based on the number (and type) of times the user appears on those tag lines for the commits in a given time frame Iñaki Arenaza 22:10, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Other stuff

• Converting unit tests to PHP Unit -- I hope someone will tell us what the plan is with this.
• Heads up: Development:Question_Engine_2 coming in Moodle 2.1 -- Tim Hunt
• Proposal for a better cron infrastructure - a nice idea that was talked about a year ago, and it would be nice not to forget it
• Performance Profiling - Dan P [on behalf of Eloy]

Finally, a big thank you to everyone who made check-ins to Moodle 2.0 code :-)