[Buildbot-devel] Volunteering and some suggestions.

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 7:43 PM, Gavin <gavin at 16degrees.com.au> wrote:
> 1. Do you have enough people looking after your VM instance? I'm in
> Australia and the time difference might help provide a bit of round the
> clock coverage. So, I'm volunteering to help maintain if you think it a good
> idea.

It's Brian's VM, so I'll leave that to him, but I certainly wouldn't complain!

> 2. I think it would benefit this project _greatly_ if Buildbot Trac Issues
> were linked to the mailing list. All Issue activity I feel should be relayed
> to the list so everyone knows what's happening there. Having this current
> discontinuity between the list and the open issues is stifling progress.
> People will go to the Issue Tracker and get more involved I feel if they can
> see what is going on from their inbox. There are many patches there and
> recent issues that some folks here probably have no clue about unless they
> remember to check the tracker. The issue tracker is just a nice way to file
> issues, but the mailing lists is where it all happens.

I had *never* thought of this, but I think it's a great idea.  I'm not
too sure how to accomplish it, but I'm sure it's possible.

> 3. Going through the Issues, there are quite a few with what seem like
> trivial patches already attached. Some many months old. Some of those people
> have spent time working on the project to help improve it for their own and
> everyone elses benefit, and provided some nice diffs etc. How much easier
> does it need to be? The moral of some of these folks will wain if their
> patches are left hanging on an issue tracker for weeks or months at a time.

This is a shame, and I'll take some of the blame.  I (a) haven't been
spending enough time on BuildBot lately and (b) don't find Trac easy
to use at all, so it's not the first place I go when I have time.
Also, it's not clear to me how to quickly find the most recent changes
to all bugs since I was last there.  I have a feed in my Google Reader
that, in theory, accomplishes this, yet I seem to miss bugs all the
time

> I wonder if Trac can be configured or a custom feed configured to send an
> email once a week to this list for all issues that contain a patch, is that
> do-able?

So with a little help, I'd be happy to see this incorporated.

> I have just downloaded the latest trunk, would it help if I rounded up a few
> of these patches and other ideas and applied them to my copy? Then a one off
> merge to trunk (or a branch for testing by others if need be) would be
> easier and time saving for you guys? Let me know if you want me to do that.

That would certainly be fine with me, but I'm also happy to do the
merging, too.  In fact, I see my position with buildbot as mainly "the
guy who merges stuff and does releases[1]."  So how about this: send
me a list of the bugs you see as mergeable, and I'll merge them if
possible, and post to the bugs either way.

Thanks for the great suggestions!

[1] Which reminds me, we need to do a 0.7.12 release soon!  I'll start
a new thread for that.

Dustin

-- 
Open Source Storage Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com