[Mageia-sysadm] Use of Reviewboard

[Michael scherer]

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