Re: Tooling Integration and Developer Experience

Hi folks,

I'd like to first of all thank Warner for all his hard work. Working on infrastructure can seem like pretty thankless work.

As an outsider to FreeBSD, but not an outsider to the workings of FLOSS organisations, I just want to remind everyone of one core issue: It's usually insiders, not outside contributors, who do the the thankless infrastructure work. That creates two bottlenecks: People who can work on infrastructure, and people who can review incoming patches and nominate new contributors to become committers.

Having a spread out infrastructure that needs to be supported and upgraded means committer time is held up in software upgrade / migration tasks, but it also means that outside contributors spend an unnecessarily long time finding the right avenue to contribute to the right part of the code.

Mina Galić
Try PkgBase: https://alpha.pkgbase.live/

-------- Original Message --------
On 30 Jan 2023, 13:53, Warner Losh wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 3:40 AM Kurt Jaeger <pi@freebsd.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>>> > On 1/30/23 02:54, Julian H. Stacey wrote:
>>> > The main idea: to prevent information fragmentation and improve
>>> > discoverability, cross-referencing abilities, search, etc.
>>>
>>> With regards to improving discoverability, Phabricator's Owner
>>> tool could be a good tactical move: it allow to bind code area to
>>> peoples in order to automatically add them to reviews.
>>
>> If you know phabricator in more detail, is there any kind of tool
>> to understand the activity going on ?
>>
>> In bugs.freebsd.org, there is the dashboard:
>>
>> https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/page.cgi?id=dashboard.html
>>
>> I think we might need something similar to help us understand
>> the current state of the phabricator instance and the work
>> being done.
>>
>> Phab allows Dashboards, but no-one had the time to configure some
>> queries to provide relevant stats.
>
> Phab is a terrible tool for discovery. For example, how do I query all the reviews I've ticked 'OK' that are still open, by non-committers? How do I flag things as 'interesting to me'? I can tick a flag, but I can't query flags. Also, I can't get an email address for submitter either. That makes it more of a pain to land the commit.
>
> Buzilla is in many ways worse (it's absolutely terrible for doing code reviews, though it's queryability is much better). In some ways it's better for changes that are ready to go, since you can upload git format-patch output, but it too has discoverability issues.
>
> Github and gitlab pull requests are better in some ways, but worse in others. The review tool isn't as good as phab, and when you have a lot of them, they are hard to organize. But it's my preferred way to land patches because it's absolutely the easiest from a developer point of view to do so: It's one command (though the commands differ between the two).
>
> The foundation is funding the CI aspect of this: Getting jobs that developers and automation can run to gate in place. Until we have that in place and integrated together, things will be harder.
>
> But there's two other issues: The FreeBSD project has had a long history of being behind, regardless of the tools we use. There's a labor shortage to process these things as well. Second, lots of people want to talk, but few want to do the work. I tried leading an effort in this area,but grew weary of the passive-aggressive comments about how I basically sucked for not having it done already (from the same people that did 0 actual work on it).
>
> Warner