Lustre discuss - May 2011 - Landing and tracking tools improvements

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.

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.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lustre-discuss mailing list
> Lustre-discuss at lists.lustre.org
> http://lists.lustre.org/mailman/listinfo/lustre-discuss
>

A small suggestion about Maloo:
I think It would be helpful if we can sort testing results by base branch, I
actually can''t find branch information even after clicking into result
report.

Thanks
Liang

On May 24, 2011, at 1:06 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.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Lustre-discuss mailing list
> Lustre-discuss at lists.lustre.org
> http://lists.lustre.org/mailman/listinfo/lustre-discuss

Hi,

I found useful in Bugzilla system to be able to ''reply'' to a
previous
comment, with email quoting style pre-filled text box.

I also miss the ability to really simply generate a link to a specific bug
, or even a comment in a bug, when writing a comment. For instance, when I 
was writing in Bugzilla ''as explained in bug 10000 comment 3'',
my comment
was processed and ''bug 10000 comment 3'' was turned into a
clickable link.
In order to be usable this would require the comments to be numbered.

Apart from that, I like the possibility to edit or delete my own comments.
Keep up the good work!

Cheers,
Sebastien.

lustre-discuss-bounces at lists.lustre.org a ?crit sur 23/05/2011 19:06:40 :
> De : Chris Gearing <chris at whamcloud.com>
> A : lustre-discuss at lists.lustre.org
> Date : 23/05/2011 19:06
> Objet : [Lustre-discuss] Landing and tracking tools improvements
> Envoy? par : lustre-discuss-bounces at lists.lustre.org
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Lustre-discuss mailing list
> Lustre-discuss at lists.lustre.org
> http://lists.lustre.org/mailman/listinfo/lustre-discuss
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I have to echo some of the comments of Chris Morrone. 

The in-line comments in Gerrit do not appear in the "expanded" view,
and need to be found individually in the various patches. Having 3 lines of
context plus the comments is enough for most cases, and if not then a URL to the
actual comment would be great.

While the linking from Gerrit back to Jira is good (due to embedded
"LU-nnn" link in patch summary line) it is not so easy to find which
changes in Gerrit are open from the Jira ticket. Sometimes there are multiple
changes open for a single bug, either by accident (forgetting the Change-Id) or
on purpose.  Having a single comment in Jira for each open change would be good.

I also agree that allowing an entire change to be visible on a single page would
be helpful. I user to pre-load a bunch of patches from bugzilla into my browser
before a flight, but with Gerrit that isn''t really practical due to the
number of tabs it would create.

That said, I like that Gerrit is a "gatekeeper" and ensures that what
is inspected is also what is tested and landed, even if it means that patches
sometimes have to go through multiple review cycles for trivial changes.

Being able to compare patches against previous versions in Gerrit speeds up the
process of reviewing new versions of a change, but it is complicated if the
"base" version of the patch is changed. At that point it will also
show what gas changed between the base versions as if it were part of the patch,
which is confusing. It would be better to limit the output to only the code that
was modified in the two changes.

Cheers, Andreas

On 2011-05-23, at 11:06 AM, Chris Gearing <chris at whamcloud.com> 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.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Lustre-discuss mailing list
> Lustre-discuss at lists.lustre.org
> http://lists.lustre.org/mailman/listinfo/lustre-discuss