[Pkg-puppet-devel] Commit practices, code review, etc

[Nigel Kersten]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 7:55 AM, Nigel Kersten <nigel at explanatorygap.net> wrote:
> 2010/2/18 micah anderson <micah at riseup.net>:
>> On Wed, 17 Feb 2010 23:20:56 +0100, Stig Sandbeck Mathisen <ssm at debian.org> wrote:
>>> Andrew Pollock <apollock at debian.org> writes:
>>>
>>> > Coming from Google, I'm totally sold on principle of doing code
>>> > reviews prior to submitting changes.
>>> >
>>> > I feel that at the moment, we're all just commiting changes to the Git
>>> > repository on Alioth in a fairly uncoordinated manner. If we had a
>>> > code review prior to a commit, this would at least give everyone
>>> > advance warning of an impending commit.
>>>
>>> I've no experience with code review tools, but having a way to review
>>> commits before they enter the master branch on alioth would be an
>>> improvement.
>>
>> My experience with code review tools has been that the tools were in the
>> way of the developers, so they never did the code review. However,
>> everyone (including myself) believes that it is a good way to go, as
>> long as the workflow/tool issue is not in the way, but actually
>> facilitates good communication and better-quality code without
>> sacrificing the sanity of the people working on it.
>>
>> I've never tried this on a packaging team, but I'm encouraged by folks
>> here, who have expressed positive experiences with this process, to give
>> it a go.
>
> Working at Google where code reviews are an intrinsic part of
> *everything* we write, from Makefiles to bash scripts to larger
> python/ruby modules to just about everything, I can't imagine going
> back to not having code reviews.
>
> The great thing is that it allows different levels of participation.
> If you're really busy, and don't have a lot of time to actually do
> commits, you probably still have the 10 minutes or so it takes to read
> over someone else's commit and provide useful feedback.
>
>
>
>>
>>> > The question is how to insert this into the workflow? I know of
>>> > Gerrit, which seems pretty cool, because it's like the code review
>>> > tool we use internally at Google. I don't know much about how it
>>> > integrates with Git, or what it would take to spin up an instance of
>>> > it (I think it's Java-based).
>>
>> I've tried a few that I wouldn't recommend, I'm interested in checking
>> out Gerrit for a few projects that have been struggling with this
>> question. Its unfortunate that the packaging work hasn't been done on
>> it, as I'd like to try it without investing a lot of time on it.
>>
>>> > It seems like one for all of Alioth would be the way go.
>>>
>>> I'm not sure what you mean here. :)
>>
>> I think what he is saying is that it would be nice if Alioth had
>> something like this built-in, or available for us to turn on.

Review Board looks interesting.

http://demo.reviewboard.org/r/

http://www.reviewboard.org/docs/manual/dev/faq/#does-review-board-support-git