[storm] Moving Storm Forward

[Drew Smathers]

On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 2:34 AM, James
Henstridge<james.henstridge at canonical.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> Last week, a number of the Canonical Storm developers met at the
> Ubuntu Developer Summit and had a few informal discussions about Storm
> and how to improve the development process.  Below are some of my
> thoughts coming from those discussions.
>
> = Get More People Working on Trunk =
>
> If someone were to look at the revisions in Storm's trunk, they'd see
> that pretty much all the recent commits come from Canonical employees.
>  However, if they looked at the other branches registered on
> Launchpad, it is clear that there are a number of long lived feature
> branches containing significant contribution from the community.  The
> prominent ones are:
>
>  * twisted-integration
>  * Oracle support
>  * Microsoft SQL Server support
>
> While the current state of affairs might be workable for their current
> users, I think it would be beneficial to try and get them merged to
> trunk ASAP.

This sounds like a good idea to me.  While it's "workable" to maintain
two branches merged with stable, it leaves me a little on edge since
the code doesn't go through the normal test and release cycle.

> Some benefits of merging the branches include:
>
> 1. Make things easier for users who need features from more than one
> of these branches.  From bug and branch activity on Launchpad, it is
> clear that at least one person (Drew Smathers) has been using Oracle
> together with twisted-integration.
>
> 2. Easier handling of bug fixes.  If a developer working on the Oracle
> or MS-SQL branches, there is probably a temptation to fix unrelated
> bugs on those feature branches since they will be immediately useful
> to what they are working on.  Fixing the bug on trunk would require
> waiting for the fix to get merged and then attempting to merge trunk
> into the feature branch.  If the delta between trunk and what the
> developer is working on is small, then there shouldn't be much
> disadvantage to fixing things on trunk.
>
> 3. Easier to take advantage of features/bug fixes from trunk.  This is
> related to the previous one: if the branch a developer is using has
> diverged significantly from trunk, then it will be difficult for them
> to merge changes from trunk.
>
> Of course, there are some problems to overcome in merging Oracle and
> MS-SQL support.  I am currently able to run tests for all supported DB
> backends on my machine when committing to trunk, but that will be
> difficult with these two due to licensing and ties to Windows for
> MS-SQL.  Perhaps a buildbot instance might be the answer, if we can
> get appropriate slaves set up.
>

I should be able to make a buildbot slave from a dev server for
testing Oracle if you decide to take that route.

> Another issue is test coverage for the new backends.  If they don't
> currently pass all the tests, might it be appropriate to merge them
> anyway and work out a process where we can ratchet down the set of
> failures to zero post merge?
>
> = Reviews =
>
> Changes make their way to trunk through Launchpad's code review
> system.  A list of branches waiting for review is available here:
>
>    https://code.launchpad.net/storm/+activereviews
>
> While most review work is being done by the core Storm team at the
> moment, I'd welcome others to help out.  Even if you don't have a deep
> knowledge of Storm, a general knowledge of Python programming can
> often be enough to see things the original developer missed.
>
> = IRC Meetings =
>
> Gustavo mentioned this on the mailing list a few months back, but we
> haven't actually organised it.  It'd be helpful to have a regular IRC
> meeting to discuss the development of Storm.  I think it'd be good to
> aim for a monthly meeting at least initially, but we could do it more
> frequently if we feel it is necessary.
>
> The meeting need not be too long: if there isn't much to discuss, then
> the meeting can end quickly.  This would be open
>
> Picking a time might be a bit tricky, given that we're a
> geographically dispersed team with people in America (North and
> South), Europe and Australia, but hopefully we can find a time that
> works.
>
>
> Comments are welcome, as are further suggestions to improve our
> development process.
>
> James.
>
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