Developer meeting November 2010

Developer meetings > November 2010 meeting

• Date: 07:00 UTC on 25 November 2010 - see the Moodle Developer Meeting calendar entry for conversion into your time zone
• Location: Elluminate Moodle Developers Meeting Room - login as guest by entering your email address, your actual name as display name and the password moodle

Everyone is welcome, though developers with CVS write access will be given preference if the room becomes full (normally not necessary).

Agenda

• Moodle 2.0 release
• Development:Git Migration
• 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 -- Penny or Tim -- if we run out of time, we could drop this, but it is a nice idea that was talked about a year ago, and it would be nice not to forget it.
• 2.0 Webservices need to extend its features so mobile apps (iphone, android, etc ) can sync to some features of Moodle. Ludo's UPC team is working on a functional prototype of webservices extension + html 5 for webkit mobile app, that allows access to users courses, profile, resource, forum reading and forum posting. But Webservices architecture needs to include some features to meake it work: (Ludo willnot be present due to baby issues, but Jordi piguillem will be)
  • Authentication method of the user accessing via webservices (we are thinking of implementing OAuth)
  • Function set that returns results relative to the authenticated user (rigth now external gives acces to everything)
  • Administration of webservices sets as interoperability modules.

Please add more items to the agenda!

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)