[Mageia-sysadm] Use of Reviewboard

Sun Nov 7 15:08:26 CET 2010

On Sun, Nov 07, 2010 at 09:45:00AM +0100, Dexter Morgan wrote:
+> Hi,
+> 
+> i would like us to use reviewboard to allow and encourage more contribution.
+> 
+> "
+>  Review Board is a powerful web-based code review tool that offers
+> developers an easy way to handle code reviews. It scales well from
+> small projects to large companies and offers a variety of tools to
+> take much of the stress and time out of the code review process.
+> 
+> For too long, code reviews have been too much of a chore. This is
+> largely due to the lack of quality tools available, leaving developers
+> to resort to e-mail and bug tracker-based solutions. "
+> 
+> an example of review on kde reviewboard :
+> 
+> http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/5775/
+> 
+> 
+> I don't see any reason to not use it but please give your opinion.
+
+Well, for sysadmin team, I do not see us receiveing much patchs at the moment (
+ie, 0 since the start of the team ), and I think that for the moment again, 
+a email based review would be enough for the start.
+
+So this may be overkill until people start to send us lots of patch. 
+Now, maybe the developpers ( ie -dev, -webteam ) may have others needs too, but no mail
+was sent on -dev for the moment, so I will assume that we will be users of this tool and
+not them. So unless we as sysadm team decide to do more code review ( ie, puppet review ),
+it will not be used by us.
+
+More ever, the more web application we maintain, the
+more it will difficult to upgrade the underlying framework. 
+
+In the case of transifex and reviewboard, they are both written in django.
+And as a python/django coder and maintainer, I fear that we will have sooner or 
+later a conflict of version to solve. While Django API is labeled as stable, 
+they add new features, which may requires
+updates to the core, which then may cause trouble to other applications.
+
+I have nothing against reviewboard or the idea by itself, and it may be valuable, 
+but I do think we should have demand coming from our community, before deploying
+things. Maybe the review process will not be what others want. One of the goal 
+was to listen more to others, and that's exactly what we need to do. ( and to be credible,
+it would be nice to also present alternative software, to show we took the
+more suitable one, not the one that one of us happen to know the best ).
+
+I would prefer to see "we have this need, we need to solve it with this procedure"
+rather than "here is a tool that I like, and we should install it" :/
+
+Ie, be task focused rather than product focused. 
+
+-- 
+Michael Scherer
+