Open Stack

On 03/18/2014 07:49 AM, Monty Taylor wrote:
> On 03/18/2014 06:55 AM, Sean Dague wrote:
>> On 03/18/2014 06:04 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
>>> Monty Taylor wrote:
>>>> Which means, although I tend to have a side which agrees with Clint and
>>>> Clark that replacing gerrit is a bit of a potential giant rathole - I
>>>> also think that making a scalable thing that architecturally fits with
>>>> the other things we've got would be nice.
>>>
>>> It would be nice. But I think there are two major differences between
>>> StoryBoard and Vinz from a development effort perspective...
>>>
>>> First, task tracking is fundamentally simple. As my POC proved, it's
>>> just a few database tables -- the complexity you add on top of it is
>>> just pure bonus. I see the basic code review functionality and the
>>> manipulation of associated git repositories as a much more complex
>>> endeavor.
>>>
>>> Second, I think Launchpad created a lot of developer itches that
>>> StoryBoard hopefully will allow them to scratch. So we can hope to see
>>> our developers help with StoryBoard in the future... I'm not sure Gerrit
>>> created enough pain so far. Yes it's ugly but it gets the work done
>>> pretty well. Could you point to a specific shortcoming that you can't
>>> address in the legacy app and that would be the killer feature ? In
>>> StoryBoard, that would be the ability to track cross-project features
>>> with tons of tasks.
>>>
>>> Don't get me wrong, I don't want to prevent anyone from working on
>>> anything they would like to. I'm just afraid that this is a large
>>> project and I don't see it attracting enough contributors to be a
>>> long-term sustainable alternative... potentially making it a gigantic
>>> distraction.
>>
>> I agree that if it's a problem that a set of people really want to
>> solve, so be it.
>>
>> Personally though, as one of the people that's probably spend as much
>> time in Gerrit as anyone -
>> http://stackalytics.com/?release=icehouse&metric=marks&project_type=openstack&module=&company=&user_id=
>>
>> I think the bar for replacement is really high. Because if a new tool
>> impacts my ability to review code in any negative way, be it accuracy or
>> volume, then I'm going to be properly annoyed.
>>
>> Which I do think is a difference between StoryBoard and this. With
>> launchpad the power users stopped being able to do their job at all, to
>> the point where many projects largely opt out of blueprints / bugs.
>> That's not true for code review. It's actually kind of the opposite, as
>> we have started moving non code things into Gerrit because it's actually
>> very good at it's of recording votes, seeing specific comments, and
>> recording history.
>>
>> So this has to not only be better for deployers, but it has to be better
>> for us as core reviewers. Review bandwidth is our number one constrained
>> resource in OpenStack, and has been for years, so any negative impact
>> there would be as damaging to a release as us disabling the gate
>> entirely.
>>
>> So who on the Vinz design team has regularly done 2000 gerrit reviews a
>> year to ensure that level of through put isn't impacted (in any gerrit,
>> doesn't have to be the community one)? Because that's my primary
>> concern. A new project to replace a key system I rely on every day.
>> Whose quirks I've come to understand well. With a set of tools that I
>> have to further optimize it. And a team that I've never heard of before,
>> that I see no track record of using the community gerrit in any volume,
>> coming forward to propose a replacement. So please understand I have
>> very deep concerns.
>
> I think this is a bit harsh on the folks suggesting that they work on this.
>
> Before I expand on that - I'd like to point out that gerrit is TERRIBLE
> at dealing with the volume of reviews we all have. I believe the nova
> core team recently was discussing putting attempts at new UI shims on
> top of gerrit to try to deal with queuing and prioritization better. I,
> for one, cannot deal with the mass of stuff I'm supposed to be reviewing
> worth a crap. I'd love a better UI.
>
> Back to the vinz proposal.
>
> The team who is proposing it has no track record in infra. However, they
> did start exactly right - the contacted both Jim and I (and apparently
> fungi) and we talked with them about design ideas and they're moving in
> that direction.
>
> Turns out - Jim and I already had design ideas, because we'd just had a
> conversation about what a replacement design would look like - mainly
> because of the monolithic gerrit design and the fact that we can forsee
> surpassing its ability to deal with our traffic. I'm pretty sure that he
> and I count as having done tons of reviews.
>
> I'm not worried about whether it's successful or not - precisely because
> the team hasn't interacted with us, which means if it's a COMPLETE
> failure, it's not a loss of resources on the current team.
>
> Also, I don't think we're going to suggest moving to it until it's good.
> Or better. It will need to be better.
>
> So I for one welcome the effort. Either it will work and we can use it
> and it will make our lives better - or it won't and we won't touch it.
>
>> Storyboard was started by the person who was the #1 user of Launchpad in
>> our Community, because launchpad was a giant efficiency problem in
>> making good OpenStack releases.
>>
>> So this is not the same thing as Storyboard.
>>
>> There are other options besides whole sale replacement. For instance,
>> with a modern Gerrit the UI could be replaced with a custom one built on
>> top of the REST api. That seems like a better starting point, as you
>> could sort out the UX challenges first, get an alt interfaces that we
>> all agree on, get tons of feedback in a live / high volume environment.
>> It can be a 2nd interface that gets used along side the existing one for
>> a long time, and constantly iterated on to demonstrate improvements.

This said - because they're looking at the same architecture as 
Storyboard - the Angular UI could totally be written first-ish and 
against the gerrit 2.8 APIs while the backend service is worked on. That 
could give us an alternate interface to poke at optionally for a while.

>> Then the backend switch could be taken on after the UX has proven
>> itself. This would have the advantage of being able to be dogfooded
>> really soon (as soon as the gerrit 2.8 deploy completes). It also means
>> that for UI that wasn't completed yet, it could fall back to gerrit
>> interfaces.

++

>> Anyway, realize that unlike launchpad, gerrit actually has fans. And
>> while I 100% agree Google doesn't know how to run an open source project
>> (which I think is the a challenge for any organization that largely
>> collocates their teams, as anyone not within walking distance is
>> *other*), what they've managed to produce is still pretty reasonable for
>> those of us using it every day.
>
> L
>
>
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