[Buildbot-devel] Developer Recruitment (summit topic)

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 9:41 AM, Marc-Antoine Ruel <maruel at chromium.org> wrote:
> At the same time, some things "just work" and don't really need any change
> in general. For instance, we probably don't care there's perforce tickets, I
> don't, unless someone goes ahead and fixes it. At the same time we won't
> remove perforce support because nobody contributed in the past years. It
> simply works "fine enough". I love "fine enough" software. So we should
> continue having some "fine enough" components and just don't freak out
> because there's bugs nobody wants to fix. We *can't* please everyone.

This is fair - it's fine for a project to have unsolved, un-worked-on
bugs.  There are a few particular pain-points we've been seeing,
though:

 1. It's very difficult for me to review proposed changes to most
components, yet contributors are often sending code that works for
their specific case, but breaks functionality others are using.

 2. Since I can only focus my coding effort on one thing at a time,
Buildbot tends to develop in the direction of my (and now my
employer's) interests.  That's not healthy for the project, and tends
to starve components I'm not attending to of the TLC they deserve.
There are a lot of interesting directions that Buildbot "wants" to go
- latent slaves, better windows support, statusdb, build coordination,
new slave interfaces, etc. - and I think it is in everyone's interest
to see the project develop in more than one of these directions.

> I think you're over splitting it. For instance, I know Status(Push|Json)
> stuff so I'm basically the owner of that area, having written almost 100% of
> it. A component is orthogonal to handling tests or handling relevant
> tickets. To me, core maintainer (e.g. dictator) + packager + buildbot.net
> admin = one person. Guess who? :P

I don't see how a component is orthogonal to related tests or tickets
- if there is a bug related to Windows slaves, that needs to be
handled by someone familiar with running buildslaves on Windows.  The
BitKeeper source steps need tests, and since I don't have BK, I can't
test that.

> As most contributors, we do it on our spare time, fighting our manager,
> potentially at the cost of potentially not being promoted. I think
> distributed authority doesn't work. It just creates bystander effect. It's
> simpler if only one person has the last word. As for more administrative
> tasks, I guess the more it can be automated, the more it can be delegated.
> E.g. not create the administrative tasks in the first place.

Mozilla's history would beg to differ with the statement that
"distributed authority doesn't work," but you're right - it's hard to
make it work.  I intend to have the last word, but in many cases I
don't have the knowledge or time to properly address questions.

Dustin