[storm] Moving Storm Forward

[James Henstridge]

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 12:15 AM, Vernon Cole <vernondcole at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > = 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
>
>
> This would be a great thing!
>
> Storm seems to suffer from a Canonical-centric attitude. (If Canonical does
> not need it, we're not interested.) This is almost never seen in other
> Canonical projects like bazaar and launchpad.

I'm sorry if that's the impression you got.  The big difference
between Storm and the other projects you've mentioned is that Storm
does not have any full time developers: instead it is infrastructure
used by a number of Canonical projects (Landscape, Launchpad and
UbuntuOne).  This means that most of the contributions you see from us
are driven by the needs of those projects (although we do try to
review and merge changes from others).

I think we can do better than we have in the past though, which is why
I started this thread.  I don't expect community members to have a
higher commitment to the project than us (if they are hacking on
Storm, it is most likely to support one of their own projects too),
but I'd like to see that effort put into the trunk.

>   I personally felt quite a cold reception when I submitted an attempt to
> make the tutorial more approachable. This has made me hesitate to make other
> contributions.

The problem with that branch was that it changed the tutorial from
what we'd consider idiomatic Storm use to a form we would not
recommend new users use.  If you took this as personal criticism
rather than criticism of the change, I am sorry about that: it wasn't
intended.  If you peruse the past bug and review comments, you'll find
criticisms of pretty much every Storm developer's code.

Jonathan Lange's paper "Your Code Sucks and I Hate You: The Social
Dynamics of Code Reviews"
(http://mumak.net/stuff/your-code-sucks.html) is worth a read to get
an idea of the role we see for code review.

> The present discussion about storm <-> schema integration
> also hints at a keep-out attitude by the Canonical team. Perhaps Canonical
> management needs to give the team more time budget to consider outside uses
> of storm as well as internal use?

I'll try and make some time to reply to that thread soon.  The short
answer is that we've found that schema generation does not work for
actively developed applications.  Instead it is better to rely solely
on a schema migration framework since (a) you'll need it to upgrade
your production apps and (b) by using the same schema migrations in
development you know you're working with the same schema as production
will have on next roll out.

I would like to see Storm include such a framework, but have not had
time to work on it personally.  We have a few half baked frameworks
inside Canonical, but nothing I'd drop directly into Storm.  The one
being used for Launchpad will be released with the rest of the source
code next month for what it is worth.  It is the oldest one we've got,
and is pretty PostgreSQL specific, but might be a good starting point
if someone wants to look at such a project.

James.

> --
> Vernon Cole
>
>