[Lustre-discuss] Landing and tracking tools improvements

[Christopher J. Morrone]

My biggest complaint is that discussion about an issue and its 
associated patch(es) is scattered about in multiple locations instead of 
located in a single bug like with bugzilla.

Here is a list of things I have had trouble with:

- jira: There is no clue in the jira ticket that the conversation is 
taking place in a gerrit changeset. And unless I am a submitter or 
review on the gerrit patch, I don't necessarily even get email about it. 
  Maybe if I "star" a commit I get email.  But then I wind up with yet 
more email spam... its just not easy to piece together what is going on 
with an issue.  Whamcloud folks certainly aren't updating the jira 
tickets every time there is patch discussion or change.  I don't blame 
them; it is tedious and time consuming to make the same comments in 
multiple places.

- gerrit: The Comments section in gerrit isn't particularly well 
rendered either.  At the very least "expanded" view should probably be 
the default option.

- gerrit: It is nice that comments can be placed in-line in the patch 
files, but the interface is pretty sorely lacking.  I've had a number of 
issues with that:
   - It is difficult to find all of the in-line comments
   - It is difficult to reply to the in-line comments.  If I do it
     in-line, it lets you "save" the comment, but that doesn't actually
     mean that anyone can SEE the comment.  You need to jump out to
     another web page to actually commit the comment or something.  Very
     confusing.
   - If you haven't already made yourself a "reviewer", man, good
     freakin' luck.

- gerrit: I want a ONE-PAGE unified diff.  A one-page side-by-side 
wouldn't hurt either.  But I HATE that when I hit "Diff All Unified" my 
web broswer goes out to lunch at 25 tabs are all openned in parallel.

- gerrit: The diff rendering may or may not be broken at times.  Prakash 
pointed out to me that that there is a way to diff a patch set against 
an earlier revision, and if you do that by accident it can be mighty 
confusing.  So maybe I did that by accident...who knows.  Just plain 
confusing.

- Despite requiring a valid jira ticket number in the comment of a git 
commit before gerrit will accept it, there is no message in jira that a 
new commit has arrived, or that an updated commit has been submitted to 
an existing gerrit commit.

- jira: I never have any idea who I am talking to when I put a comment 
in jira.  I can see the "Assignee" and "Reporter".  Everyone else is 
just a secret "Watcher".  If I have an in-person conversation with a 
developer, and I know he is keenly interested in the issue that I am 
working on,  how do I know if he remembered to sign himself up for 
watching the ticket?  What happens now is that I have to go out-of-band 
to email and say "hey, are you watching LU-XX?".  With bugzilla and 
other issues trackers I have used, the list of watchers is available to all.

- jira: The search tool is not as good as bugzilla.  The default search 
suprisingly misses things that I KNOW are in a ticket many times.  And 
when I need to do a more complex search, I need to learn an entire 
search language specific to jira.  With bugzilla, I could do all of the 
advanced searching through a web page with drop-down boxes and radio 
switches and such.  Bugzilla's search was noticeably better than jira's 
in my opinion.

- jira: No way to CC people on an issue.  Again, I need to go 
out-of-band and email folks that I know should be looking at an issue. 
With bugzilla, I could simply CC them on the bug.

- gerrit: The search tool here is just TERRIBLE.  I should be able to 
type any keyword that I know is in a patch's commit message and find it, 
or type a function name that I know appears in a patch and get a list of 
patches with that function name, etc.  But gerrit just flat out rejects 
with an error message almost everything that I try to search for. 
Awful, awful search tool.

- jira: I can't edit pretty much any field at the top of a bug, even on 
issues that I have submitted myself.  If I learn later on that my 
subject line makes no sense, or the platform is wrong, or anything else, 
I can't fix it.  I could under bugzilla.

- Accounts/Passwords:  I have, what, four distinct accounts/passwords to 
use all all of the whamcloud tools?  And the gerrit one is ESPECIALLY 
annoying with its OpenID single-sign-on.  Being at a lab with a very 
restrictive firewall and no OpenID service of its own makes this rather 
difficult to use.  And this may be our firewall in action again, but I 
seem to be logged out of gerrit every few minutes...maybe it is hours, 
but it certainly seems like I need to re-login constantly.

- What is the deal with separate review.whamcloud.com and 
git.whamcloud.com git repos?  Can't we just use the one review.whamcloud 
one?  Jenkins seems to take me to gitweb all of the time, when really I 
want to see the gerrit changeset...

- The comments from Jenkins/Build Master in jira REALLY need to stop. 
It is just getting rediculous that I need to constantly shrink several 
(sometimes several dozen) different comments from Build Master which 
each have 25 lines exactly in common, and only 1 line that differs. 
There is no need to list the names of files that have changed in the 
patch in a comment from the build master.  All we need is a link to the 
gerrit change set.  MAYBE we have a single short command from the 
builder when the build is complete (or starts) with link to a page that 
will summarize the entire state of the build and what did and did not 
build correctly.

Finally, let me say "thanks" to all of the people putting in work to 
improve the state of lustre's tools.  Having an automated review and 
build systems is going to be very beneficial to Lustre, and I know that 
it takes a lot of effort behind the scenes to make this all work.

So despite my list of complaints, I really do appreciate all of the hard 
work you are doing!

Chris

On 05/23/2011 10:06 AM, Chris Gearing wrote:
> We now have a whole kit of tools [Jira, Gerrit, Jenkins and Maloo] used
> for tracking, reviewing and testing of code that are being used for the
> development of Lustre. A lot of time has been spent integrating and
> connecting them appropriately but as with anything the key is to
> continuously look for ways to improve what we have and how it works.
>
> So my question is what do people think of the tools as they stand today
> and how can we improve them moving forwards. if people can respond to
> lustre-discuss then I'll correlate the outcome of any discussions and
> then create a Wiki page that can form some plan for improvement.
>
> Please be as descriptive as possible in your replies and take into
> account that I and others have no experience of Lustre past so if you
> liked something prior to the current tools you'll need to help me and
> them understand the details.
>
> Thanks
>
> Chris
>
> ---
> Chris Gearing
> Snr Engineer
> Whamcloud. Inc.
>
>
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