[Twisted-Python] twistechecker and twisted-dev-tools as part of twisted main repo

[Adi Roiban]

On 18 March 2015 at 05:43, Glyph <glyph at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mar 16, 2015, at 2:17 AM, Adi Roiban <adi at roiban.ro> wrote:
>
[snip]

> I'm approximately -0 on this.  I don't like the idea of dumping a bunch of
> code into the main Twisted repo that isn't distributed along with Twisted
> (personally I cannot wait to get rid of the "admin" directory entirely), but
> I also see your point about the tool being a part of the process.

>> Twistedchecker  has become an important part of dev process and I feel
>> that the reviews for this project should be more visible.

> To be fair we are only just now getting down to a reasonable latency on
> Twisted reviews, and it is still a fairly small audience reviewing.  This
> may just lengthen the Twisted review queue :).

As commented earlier, any tickets which sits idle in the review queue
for more than 1 week is not reasonable for me

Some changes in twistedchecker are there to help you with general
review process so if we land them first future reviews might be faster
as you no longer have to stop and check for false positives in
twistedchecker builder.

I don't agree with your priority... but judging by the fact that
pyflakes patches took so long to land and nobody is pissed of by
twistedchecker I feel in minority :(
For me improving the infrastructure and the tools used by the
developers is more important than the Twisted code itself.

It seems to me that you are suggesting that we can build a state of
the art skyscraper with bamboo scaffolding and only use our bare hands
and later we can look into creating power tools and advanced cranes
and scaffolding.

Maybe we are used with the fact that you can only run static code
analysis on buildbot and for that you need a commit and to manually
trigger a build by filling a web form and wait 2 minutes for results,
but this is stone age :(

pyflakes and twistedchecker should run in less than 1 second on local
computer. To optimize speed the checker should be smart and only check
the files which have changes since trunk.

---------

What I am trying to do is to convince other Twisted developers that
tools and infrastructure are important and they should be top
priority.
I am advocating for replacing primitive tools.

The current review process is a pain for new non-commiter
contributors. Read-only clone of svn, manual patches attached to trac,
review commend digested into a single comment, new branches created
for conflicting changes... etc

Developing good tools take a lot of effort... so does writing good
tests. Tools should be at least as important as the code or the tests
. In fact, tests are just a tool to help you develop code.

> So, I do have an alternate proposal - perhaps you should just announce
> changes to twistedchecker on this list, and land changes to it without
> review if nobody objects within a week or so.  If you're making changes that
> are time-sensitive and there is an insufficient community to participate in
> reviews, then I think it's fair to say that they shouldn't be reviewed.  If
> anyone objects to the changes that are going in, they can always sign up to
> do reviews :).  I have implicitly instituted such a process for
> Twisted-umbrella projects like Imaginary and Vertex, where there are not
> enough active contributors to sustain development.
>

Beside twistedchecker there are also twisted-dev-tools and the repos
from twisted-infra organization.

I am not happy about cowboy / one man show coding. Merging a change
without a review as this will break things for sure.

My alternate proposal is to try to raise awareness that good tools are
at least as important as good tests and have more people reviewing
code for tools and work on improving the tools and to consider them an
integral part of the development process.

Cheers!
-- 
Adi Roiban