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On 08/07/2014 09:55 AM, John Griffith wrote:
> ​Seems everybody that's been around a while has noticed "issues" this
> release and have talked about it, thanks Thierry for putting it together so
> well and kicking off the ML thread here.
> 
> I'd agree with everything that you stated, I've also floated the idea this
> past week with a few members of the Core Cinder team to have an "every
> other" release for new drivers submissions in Cinder (I'm expecting this to
> be a HUGELY popular proposal [note sarcastic tone]).
> 
> There are three things that have just crushed productivity and motivation
> in Cinder this release (IMO):
> 1. Overwhelming number of drivers (tactical contributions)
> 2. Overwhelming amount of churn, literally hundreds of little changes to
> modify docstrings, comments etc but no real improvements to code

I'm not sure that there is much data to support that this has been a
problem to the point of impacting productivity.  Even if some patches
make changes that aren't too significant, those tend to be quick to
review.  Personally, I haven't found this to be a troublesome area, and
it's been clear that Cinder does need some cleanup/refactoring work in
some areas.

Just going on my gut feeling, I'd argue that we too often have patchsets
that are too large and should be split into a series of smaller commits,
and that concerns me more, because these are both harder to review and
harder to catch bugs in.

> 3. A new sense of pride in hitting the -1 button on reviews.  A large
> number of reviews these days seem to be -1 due to punctuation or
> misspelling in comments and docstrings.  There's also a lot of "my way of
> writing this method is better because it's *clever*" taking place.

I still don't really have a good sense of how much this happens and what
the impact is.  But, the basic problem with this argument is that if we
feel that #2 and #3 are both problems, we are effectively inviting the
code/documentation to get sloppier and rot over time.  It needs to
either be cleaned up in review or patched later.

(Or if there's a dispute about "need" there, we at least need to be ok
with letting people who feel that this is worthwhile fix it up.)

I'd add:
4. Quite a few people have put time into working on third-party driver
CI, presumably at the expense of the other usual efforts.  This is fine,
and a good thing, but it surely impacted the amount of attention given
to other efforts with our small team.

> In Cinder's case I don't think new features is a problem, in fact we can't
> seem to get new features worked on and released because of all the other
> distractions.  That being said doing a maintenance or hardening only type
> of release is for sure good with me.
> 
> Anyway, I've had some plans to talk about how we might fix some of this in
> Cinder at next week's sprint.  If there's a broader community effort along
> these lines that's even better.
> 
> Thanks,
> John