Open Source Meeting/2007-07-19

< Open Source Meeting
Open source meeting - Thursday, 2pm PT
* The "Open Source Viewer" name
* Splitting up triages
* PJIRA - email notifications or alternatives
* Peer-review and in-progress patches
* Discussion of test plans at QA Portal
== Transcript (raw) ==
[14:08] Rob Linden pulls up agenda
[14:08] Soft Linden: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Open_Source_Meeting/Agenda
[14:09] Rob Linden: thx
[14:09] Soft Linden: <-- RobBot
[14:09] Rob Linden: first up: naming. not much to talk about here
[14:09] Dzonatas Sol: nope... just who is really interested in the name probably showed =)
[14:09] Rob Linden: make sure y'all read the trademark policy
[14:09] Rob Linden: it's pretty important in this case.
[14:09] Dzonatas Sol: "Open Source" itself can't be trademarked
[14:09] Dale Glass: got a link to that?
[14:10] Dzonatas Sol: so it was just the generic name off that.. not intended elsewise
[14:10] Rob Linden: http://secondlife.com/corporate/trademark/
[14:10] Soft Linden: It does beg the question though - are we still looking at doing periodic builds off the svn when we've got everyone on that? I'd wondered if Dzonatas' build was meant to be a placeholder on that, or something parallel
[14:11] Dzonatas Sol: I'm hoping for more formal QA on the build
[14:11] Dzonatas Sol: its a lot of work
[14:11] Rob Linden: the main thing is the use of "Second Life"...it's important to come up with a name that doesn't imply it's created distributed by Linden Lab
[14:11] Dale Glass: hmm
[14:11] Dale Glass: "You may distribute unchanged official binaries downloaded from SecondLife.com to anyone in any way subject to governing law, without receiving any further permission from Linden. "
[14:11] Wyn Galbraith: What sort of QA do you need Dzonatas?
[14:11] Dale Glass: this seems like the answer to what I asked ages ago
[14:11] Dale Glass: but doesn't it conflict with KDU?
[14:12] Poppy Linden: actually, re: OSS viewer, is this supposed to be a single central community build, or just a way for different viewers to prefix their titles?
[14:12] Dzonatas Sol: Shoudl I remove the "Second Life" name from the dirtrubtion.. and just leave it on the exe?
[14:12] Dzonatas Sol: Wyn, there are lots of patches in the build that need testing on different platforms.
[14:13] Dzonatas Sol: We have tons of patches.. but no steps to test them.
[14:13] Dale Glass: If anybody is interested, I'm slowly doing that in my repository. Working on replacing references to LL and the official website with mine, and such
[14:13] Wyn Galbraith: So just choose one?
[14:13] Dzonatas Sol: Poppy, with all the patches and other work put together, I hope to combine the effort for the QA
[14:14] Dzonatas Sol: it beats having tons of different builds
[14:14] Dzonatas Sol: and proves the patches can be applied and work together
[14:14] Soft Linden: Rob's having trouble reconnecting - workin' on it
[14:14] Dale Glass: say, kinda OT, but: anybody knows offhand what's the windows version of strptime? Or maybe there's something in the codebase for that which I missed?
[14:14] Dzonatas Sol: Wyn, just one patch? there are many =)
[14:15] Neuro Linden: i can't remember how centos do this; they strip out all the references to Red Hat and all their associated trademarks for each new build
[14:15] Wyn Galbraith: Well, start with one and then the next and then the next... one a a time.
[14:15] Neuro Linden: re rob
[14:15] Dzonatas Sol: wb
[14:15] Dzonatas Sol: I actually like "ThirdLife"... *wink*
[14:16] Rob Linden accepted your inventory offer.
[14:16] Neuro Linden: i was thinking Segunda Vida ;)
[14:16] Wyn Galbraith likes that.
[14:16] Dzonatas Sol: I'll make one with that hehe
[14:16] Dale Glass: but that's just the name in spanish
[14:16] Dzonatas Sol: Alright... thanks for the minute Rob
[14:17] Dale Glass: it might confuse spanish people
[14:17] Soft Linden: Are some of these starting to be Liana questions?
[14:17] Neuro Linden: dale: yeah, i know, that literally just occured to me
[14:17] Poppy Linden: Soft: sounds like it :)
[14:17] Rob Linden: just got caught up (Soft gave me what I missed). this page is relevant to how I think Second Life should be referenced: http://secondlife.com/corporate/trademark/services.php
[14:18] Dale Glass: I'm thinking, we could probably use a patch that'd separate the branding stuff a bit
[14:18] Wyn Galbraith: How about Second Look. It is a viewer right?
[14:18] Wyn Galbraith: Na, to simiiar, sorry
[14:18] Dale Glass: something like const LLString COMPANY_NAME "Linden Lab"; so that it could be changed in one place
[14:19] Wyn Galbraith: That's actually a good idea, Dale.
[14:19] Rob Linden: actually, I agree
[14:19] Stevex Janus: You mignt also want to change the icons too.
[14:19] Rob Linden: anything that can modularize the branding/trademarks would be a big plus
[14:19] Soft Linden: If you wanted to do that in a patch, and add a doc to docs/ listing all the icon and bitmap locations that should change too, I could probably bring that in.
[14:19] Dzonatas Sol: I didn't use any of the icons.
[14:19] Soft Linden: The copyright headers should stay intact, but other than that...
[14:20] Stevex Janus: Then spinnining hand onthe splash screen
[14:20] Wyn Galbraith: Anything that can be changed should have a placeholder where it's easy to get at and you only change it once.
[14:20] Able Whitman: I agree.. Like Dale I've started to do some rebranding myself, but things are sort of scattered all over the place.
[14:20] Dale Glass: BTW, if anybody wants to work on that, I'm busy with other things ATM, but my repository has a branding branch from which you can get a list of all the changes I made. That could be a start
[14:21] Able Whitman: Dale, if you'd like some help producing a branding-consolidation patch, I'd be happy to help out
[14:21] Dzonatas Sol: I'll be interested in the branding now that my internet speed just jumped.
[14:21] Soft Linden: Someone do me a favor and JIRA this? I'll import and make sure Liana sees it too.
[14:21] Dale Glass: I've recently coded an update checking mechanism that downloads new versions from my site. Also got an initial crash reporting script going
[14:22] Soft Linden: /softask ping Liana on rebranding JIRA
[14:22] /softask: Task from Soft Linden accepted by server.
[14:22] Rob Linden: k....next up:
[14:22] Rob Linden: splitting up triages
[14:23] Dale Glass: Able, maybe a bit later, when I finish what I'm working on, but sure :-) Meanwhile you can see if you find anything useful in my repository. Mail me if you need anything of course
[14:23] Able Whitman: Dale, will do :)
[14:23] Rob Linden: we have two weekly triages now (Monday general triage, Tuesday UI triage)
[14:23] Able Whitman: Rob, is the idea to have "themed" triages? Or just UI and general?
[14:24] Rob Linden: the idea that's starting to gain some steam at Linden Lab is themed triages
[14:24] Able Whitman nods
[14:24] Wyn Galbraith nods and agrees.
[14:24] Neuro Linden: hi liana
[14:24] Dzonatas Sol: The UI triage is working well, but there is still a lot of hand-holding =p
[14:24] Soft Linden: Also, the possibility of separating off some of these patch triages from general bug triages...
[14:25] Able Whitman: I think component- or feature-area-specific triages are a good way to help make sure the right people can get together without having so large a group and so many issues that you get logjammed.
[14:25] Wyn Galbraith: Nice legs.
[14:25] Liana Linden: Hi. Sorry I'm late. Calendar malfunction.
[14:25] Soft Linden: The big thing with the patch triages is we probably don't want to take just a top-N item approach with patches that might have good value, and which would get harder to merge as time goes on...
[14:26] Soft Linden: Taking an hour's worth of bug reports and importing just the top issues is a pretty good approach to matching available internal manpower. But the patches are a bit different on that count.
[14:26] Wyn Galbraith: /waves at Squirrel.
[14:26] Squirrel Wood: hihi
[14:26] Dzonatas Sol: HI Liana
[14:26] Dale Glass: btw
[14:27] Dale Glass: if anybody wants to see the changes in my viewer, http://sl.daleglass.net
[14:27] Dale Glass: windows installer only for now
[14:27] Soft Linden: I don't know if it's final, but there's at least talk about the studio blacklight manager taking over the general bug stuff, letting Rob's hour focus on stuff the sldevers might have ready for import.
[14:27] Dzonatas Sol: Soft, doesn't the OSLCC effort help with that on ability to merge patches?
[14:27] Soft Linden: Sorry - didn't mean to hijack, Rob. Throw something at me if I'm disruptin' :)
[14:28] Rob Linden: by all means, keep going
[14:28] Able Whitman: I think it's really good to at least touch on all the JIRA issues that get imported, but I think that patches could get more attention if we had a more formalized process to code review and test patches.
[14:28] Soft Linden: It might, Dzonatas. Actually, it's on the agenda two items down to see what we can do to streamline patch uptake. If nobody's got questions or suggestions on splitting up the triages, we could skip to that out of order?
[14:29] Rob Linden: sure
[14:29] Soft Linden: Hee. As Able says, too.
[14:29] Dale Glass: Oh yeah, my previous question seems to have been ignored, and now that Liana is here...
[14:29] Dale Glass: the distribution page says:
[14:29] Dale Glass: "You may distribute unchanged official binaries downloaded from SecondLife.com to anyone in any way subject to governing law, without receiving any further permission from Linden"
[14:29] Able Whitman: That is, if there were a well-defined way for patch submitters to have other open source contributors review and test submitted patches, it would cut down on the manpower LL would need to devote to handling them.
[14:29] Dale Glass: but it's my knowledge that KDU may not be redistributed
[14:29] Dale Glass: isn't there a conflict there?
[14:29] Able Whitman: Sorry Soft, I'm getting ahead of things :)
[14:29] Liana Linden reads...
[14:29] Soft Linden: No, it's good Able - we'll get back to that in a sec :) It's exactly where I wanted to go.
[14:30] Squirrel Wood wants to see procedural textures in SL ^^
[14:30] Wyn Galbraith: lag test
[14:31] Squirrel Wood gave you MetFin.
[14:31] Rob Linden: Dale: we have a distribution license for KDU. I'm not familiar with the exact tos about what is/isn't allowed, but I'm assumign that clause is consistent with our license
[14:31] Liana Linden: I need to look into what our specific agreement with KDU says
[14:31] Liana Linden: and my hunch is the same as Rob's . Can I get back to you next week?
[14:32] Rob Linden: (one thing I should note: both Liana and I will be at OSCON next week)
[14:32] Dale Glass: sure, no hurry with that
[14:32] Dale Glass: I've got things mostly arranged with my installer here
[14:32] Liana Linden: Was your question appropos of something in particular, Dale?
[14:32] Wyn Galbraith: Don't forget to bring back stuff.
[14:32] Dale Glass: Yes, I've been investigating redistribution for installing my custom viewer
[14:33] Dale Glass: so far my conclusion was that I can ship everything but KDU
[14:33] Liana Linden: gotcha
[14:33] Rob Linden: (we've got two conversations going on here)
[14:33] Dale Glass: so my installer grabs KDU from an existing install, if it can find it
[14:33] Soft Linden: Rob and Liana away means yer all mine Mine MINE to move about like pawns on a chessboard, mua ha ha!!! Bring a plastic tarp, a signed permission slip from the parents, and a change of clothes next week, please.
[14:33] Able Whitman: lol
[14:33] Wyn Galbraith uhohs.
[14:33] Dale Glass: ack, sorry if I'm interrupting
[14:33] Liana Linden: Scary.
[14:33] Rob Linden: so...let's get back to the conversation about patch streamlining
[14:33] Wyn Galbraith has already been through Leadership Training.
[14:34] Soft Linden: Hee. 'kay...
[14:34] Rob Linden phears what soft has in mind
[14:34] Wyn Galbraith: LOL
[14:34] Neuro Linden forges permission slips for food
[14:34] Able Whitman: I was okay with everything until the plastic tarp :/
[14:34] Soft Linden: So, we can hash out details on how to do it on list, but the first question I wanted to field was - basically, is there an interest in testing each others' patches with review processes similar to what we do internally? I can let ya know what we do...
[14:34] Wyn Galbraith: Well, that's what a company I worked for called it.
[14:35] Able Whitman: Soft, in my case Yes! I will be happy to devote what time I can to doing code reviews and QA on other folks' patches.
[14:35] Opensource Obscure: i'd like to help with testing but i'm not a coder, nor particularly skilled. i just can compile the viewer.
[14:35] Soft Linden: Internally, we have someone else comb through a patch before it gets checked in, whether we authored it ourseles, or imported it from y'all, and just make sure that the person advocating the patch can explain and justify each change block in a way that the second understands.
[14:35] Dzonatas Sol: streamlining... the effort I initiated based on last week was to starts the builds, and to set up the svn in a way that ll could import/export in bulk from.
[14:35] Wyn Galbraith: Peer reviews?
[14:35] Squirrel Wood: Yups. four eyes see more than two
[14:35] Able Whitman nods
[14:36] Soft Linden: And then the checkin also includes a test plan, explaining how you could verify that the change did what it was meant, and didn't break surrounding systems. Nothing detailed, just a line or two making it clear what systems were impacted for the second part.
[14:36] Rob Linden: we've got svn.secondlife.com which we can use for this activity
[14:36] Rob Linden: we can give people who have signed contrib agreements svn access
[14:37] Dzonatas Sol: Rob, is that ready?
[14:37] Able Whitman: Would you want these test plans in the same format as described on the QA portal? Because honestly I'm not really enamored with that format :)
[14:37] Rob Linden: Dz, yes, pretty much
[14:37] Poppy Linden: We tend to use a lot of collaborative tools (screen, VNC) for checking each other's code before commit
[14:37] Poppy Linden: if we are remote
[14:37] Soft Linden: Able: Flexible. Again - mostly wanted to gauge interest and willingness. On the list, we can come up with something sane. I wouldn't want to start by trying to impose a format.
[14:38] Poppy Linden: that is something that may be more difficult
[14:38] Able Whitman: Okay, flexible is good :)
[14:38] Rob Linden: the idea would be we'd have a "contrib" area where community checkins would go, and we could eventually be able to point our build machines at that branch for distributing builds
[14:39] Dzonatas Sol: My I suggest the use of the word "sandbox" instead of "contrib"
[14:39] Dzonatas Sol: =)
[14:39] Wyn Galbraith: Sandbox is good.
[14:39] Soft Linden: It's certainly the more SL term :>
[14:39] Rob Linden: but, per what Soft and Poppy are talking about, the VNC and screen stuff is to make sure proper Q&A occurs
[14:39] Wyn Galbraith: Makes it clear, what it is. Not really, I've heard programmers in software companies call it sandbox.
[14:39] Able Whitman: Rob, would you want independent testing of a patch before it's submitted to the contrib/sandbox area on the svn?
[14:40] Soft Linden: Yeah. I don't know if the same tools work as well for a bunch of people working independently and voluntarily like this... VNC and screen are great for us... could be some extra comments meant to be stripped out could replace those here.
[14:40] Poppy Linden: My opinion on that is that it depends how y'all want to treat the "main" sandbox branch
[14:40] Dzonatas Sol: That is my concern, independt testing of every patch is slow slow for us that don't have compile farms
[14:40] Rob Linden: what Poppy said
[14:41] Dale Glass: hmm, what about big patches in development?
[14:41] Poppy Linden: internally, we have a "release" branch, and then we have a billion other branches
[14:41] Rob Linden: we could conceivably have multiple branches in the sandbox area
[14:41] Able Whitman: Well, what about having two sandbox tiers, something like "stable" and "unstable", and patches go to unstable first and when they've been tested, they go to stable?
[14:41] Neuro Linden: poppy: it's not *actually* a billion :)
[14:42] Dzonatas Sol: Poppy, for patch testing/QA and for development of features to be more formalized
[14:42] Wyn Galbraith: Or tested and untested.
[14:42] Dale Glass: for example, my avatar list is currently unfinished, and about 2200 lines long
[14:42] Wyn Galbraith: unstable sounds so negative.
[14:42] Poppy Linden: if someone feels their branch is cooked, they send out messages saying "hey we're gonna merge" and hopefully people think that's a good idea
[14:42] Rob Linden: what we do internally is we have "build me" requests, where the branch is part of the buildme request
[14:42] Able Whitman: Right, and for large feature changes, it might make sense to have temporary additional branches
[14:42] Wyn Galbraith: Untested code isn't nessarilly unstable.
[14:43] Able Whitman: Wyn, I'm not advocating and particular semantics, I just chose two words that are opposites
[14:43] Able Whitman: any*
[14:43] Soft Linden: I always liked "Debian Sid." Named for Sid, the Toy Story kid next door, who was likely to break your toys.
[14:43] Dzonatas Sol: the branches internally at LL look like CVS more than SVN *snicker*
[14:43] Rob Linden: we clearly can't have unbounded "buildme" requests coming from the community, but we might be able to figure out a budget for something
[14:43] Poppy Linden: well, what i'm getting at is that our method works for a lot of branches, which I can imagine people here are interested in
[14:43] Rob Linden: ("Sid", of course, being clearly unstable)
[14:43] Poppy Linden: rob, right
[14:44] Dale Glass: I think we could start thinking about distributed source control
[14:44] Wyn Galbraith: Tested and Untested just sound better to me. Known and unknown conditions of code.
[14:44] Dale Glass: it seems like a nice model (to me at least)
[14:44] Poppy Linden: it's almost like our internal system works like other distributed OSS systems :)
[14:45] Poppy Linden: dale: ding :P
[14:45] Dale Glass: I use SVK here
[14:45] Wyn Galbraith: It's good to see these things put into place.
[14:45] Rob Linden: I like distributed systems in principle. we'd need to figure out how to make sure that there's no confusion about patches being "contributed" if we're pulling them from elsewhere
[14:45] Dale Glass: I mirror the LL SVN repository and publish my branch from that
[14:45] Poppy Linden: scales pretty well, unless a whole lot of folks want to merge at once
[14:45] Dzonatas Sol: SVK has quirks still, its risky
[14:46] Dale Glass: well, it's just what I use. If LL goes with git or whatever I'll adopt that
[14:46] Poppy Linden: Rob: each branch would still have to be cleared, natch
[14:46] Dzonatas Sol: the best thing about being on one SVN is the history.. doing a "svn copy" with history saves a lot of times and prevents mistakes
[14:46] Dale Glass: SVK seemed to work nicely for the specific case of LL having a SVN repository
[14:46] Saijanai Kuhn: Sorry I came late, are we discussing 1336 or have we gone beyond that?
[14:46] Rob Linden: we're going to be paranoic and extra careful to ensure that we're not pulling in something that someone turns around and say "I didn't contribute that to you"
[14:46] Soft Linden: I understood Dale's SVK writeup, but I'm not entirely clear on distributed version control systems that don't have a central authoritative repository. Anyone got a good link to look at?j
[14:46] Wyn Galbraith: Saijanai: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Open_Source_Meeting/Agenda
[14:47] Soft Linden: Maybe I'll just spend time on the Mercurial site.
[14:47] Dale Glass: In my understanding, there's no center, people just agree on one
[14:47] Saijanai Kuhn: thx
[14:47] Dale Glass: what I mean is that technically my server would be just as good as LL's, except that LL's would be the one that people would consider official
[14:47] Wyn Galbraith: np
[14:47] Soft Linden: Ah, so there's still a central repository, it's just that it's a policy thing, not an architectural one.
[14:47] Rob Linden: Soft, the "center" is whatever set of repositories that your build machine pulls from
[14:48] Dzonatas Sol: I'm inclined to stay with SVN until GIT improves a few more issues.
[14:48] Rob Linden: Sardonyx Linden is pretty heavily involved with Mercurial, so we'd probably go with that unless something really really compelling caused us to evaluate one of the others
[14:49] Dale Glass: well, with svk for example: I merge changes from LL, Dzonatas could then merge changes from me, I'd then go and merge something from Able, and then LL could decide to merge that.... and so on
[14:49] Rob Linden: Dale, once again, that creates big attirubtion and auditing issues
[14:50] Dale Glass: well, in my case I keep feature branches
[14:50] Dale Glass: currently all the code in my repository is mine
[14:50] Dale Glass: if I was going to merge something external, I'd merge it into a branch, then merge that with another
[14:50] Poppy Linden: well, regardless of what tool we use, the development model is still there
[14:50] Soft Linden: To put a cap on the other topic - I'll write up a proposal for some kind of a peer signoff and a test plan template and post that to sldev - ping me after the meeting if you've got something you'd really want to see in there?
[14:51] Dzonatas Sol: GIT is suppose to track auditing on a line by line level
[14:51] Dale Glass: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Dale_Glass#Branch_Graph
[14:52] Able Whitman: Soft, sounds great, thanks!
[14:52] Poppy Linden: so, we've shuffled the agenda up a bit
[14:52] Rob Linden: any other action items from this conversation? is there anyone (w/signed agreement on file) that's interested in helping out maintaining a sandbox branch?
[14:52] Dzonatas Sol: That does bring up another topic of doing certs signing... for the future
[14:53] Dzonatas Sol: I'm interested.
[14:53] Soft Linden: The one we really missed was PJIRA email. I saw Rob putting some extra pressure on the hosting company again tho' :)
[14:53] Poppy Linden: cool
[14:53] Poppy Linden: I want that :P
[14:53] Able Whitman is also interested
[14:54] Wyn Galbraith: What agreement, Rob?
[14:54] Rob Linden: yeah, not much to say on the topic. there was actually something on our end that wasn't the hosting company's fault
[14:54] Poppy Linden: yeah, it's weird using a bugtracker that doesn't email you, very easy to forget about stuff :\
[14:54] Rob Linden: Wyn....lemme get the link
[14:54] Wyn Galbraith: NDA?
[14:54] Rob Linden: http://secondlife.com/developers/opensource/submitting
[14:54] Soft Linden: http://secondlife.com/developers/opensource/docs/SLVcontribution_agmt.pdf
[14:55] Poppy Linden: http://secondlife.com/developers/opensource/submitting
[14:55] Poppy Linden: :)
[14:55] Rob Linden: heh
[14:55] Soft Linden: Three-way race!
[14:55] Poppy Linden: we're all he same speed!
[14:55] Able Whitman: lol
[14:55] Dzonatas Sol: =)
[14:55] Wyn Galbraith: Wow, good teamwork.
[14:55] Poppy Linden: how many clicks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie roll tootsie pop?
[14:55] Soft Linden: Ya, but mine differed. When that happens with the three systems on the space shuttle computers, that system gets shut down :(
[14:56] Poppy Linden makes extremely regional kitsch reference...
[14:56] Soft Linden: Kind of running up against time - was there anything not on the agenda we wanted to push in here?
[14:56] Wyn Galbraith: I should fill one of these out maybe, even if I'm not contributing code, correct?
[14:56] Rob Linden: Wyn...not strictly necessary
[14:56] Dzonatas Sol: Wyn, if you are and you want it official
[14:57] Wyn Galbraith will anyway. "Thanks."
[14:57] Poppy Linden: yeah, it is getting to that time
[14:57] Soft Linden: You might find you're in a position to contribute documentation, UI layout, or similar later. If you're motivated - may as well get that paperwork hurdle out of the way. :)
[14:57] Rob Linden: we certainly won't turn it down....we do the checking at the time we accept a significant patch (that rises above typo-fixing level)
[14:58] Wyn Galbraith: That's what I was thinking Soft.
[14:58] Able Whitman: I'd still like to talk about the QA portal and test plans, but I'd rather table that until the next meeting, since 3 minutes isn't really enough time :)
[14:58] Soft Linden: Sure. Feel free to stick around a bit afterward, can hash out some more details on just that.
[14:58] Rob Linden: ah, right. yeah, take a look at what's there. I need to engage our QA team a little more on that anyway
[14:59] Rob Linden: I've got a 3pm mtg that I need to go to. would someone else mind posting the transcript?
[14:59] Dzonatas Sol sticks around for it
[14:59] Wyn Galbraith is off to Benjamin's, "Thanks for the meeting."
[14:59] Soft Linden: Sure, can copy it out, Rob
[14:59] Dzonatas Sol: Thank you for your time Rob!
[14:59] Rob Linden: thanks everyone!
[14:59] Able Whitman: thanks, rob!
[14:59] Soft Linden: Thanks for hostin' :)
[14:59] Wyn Galbraith: Bye!
[15:00] Poppy Linden: until next time!
[15:00] Saijanai Kuhn: bye
[15:00] Poppy Linden: foosh!
[15:00] Opensource Obscure: :) thanks & bye all
[15:00] Soft Linden: So, just on the patch review bit...
[15:00] Soft Linden: I'm pretty open to ideas here. I talked briefly about what we do internally...
[15:01] Dzonatas Sol: I'm thinking there may need to be 3 main sandbox branches
[15:01] Soft Linden: But the main thing I'm after is just some process that ensures a patch at least works, and that more than one person's looked at it to avoid the kind of simple mistakes you can make if you rush through something because it looks like it should be quick and simple.
[15:01] Able Whitman: I completely agree, Soft...
[15:02] Dzonatas Sol: One for "stable", one for "unstable" and one for Lindens to direct.
[15:02] Soft Linden: Ya - the branch thing is really a separate issue from this tho... I think we'll always accept patches individually, not in bulk. And the scope of most of these patches is too small to warrant a branch.
[15:02] Able Whitman: I think the basic process of creating a test plan, having someone code review a patch, and then going through the test plan is the right approach.
[15:02] Soft Linden: Do you have thoughts on what a code review might look like for open source contributors?
[15:03] Soft Linden: Obviously most of us aren't in a position to stand over each others' shoulders. And expecting everyone to set up VNC or the like would be a pretty high hurdle to set.
[15:03] Able Whitman: The biggest open issue is how to effectively implement that kind of process in a very heterogeneous environment, with different people in diffrerent places on different platforms on SLdev
[15:03] Soft Linden: Right.
[15:03] Dale Glass: suppose there should be a review for the coding standard, security, etc
[15:03] Dzonatas Sol: I like to see QA sub-tasks in jira, but some say that is overkill, so how do we do it?
[15:03] Boroondas Gupte: what's VNC?
[15:03] Neuro Linden: it's a remote desktop client
[15:04] Boroondas Gupte: ah
[15:04] Able Whitman: I don't think QA subtasks are overkill, i think they're just the sort of thing subtasks are good at organizing
[15:04] Soft Linden: VNC is a system for remotely viewing/controlling another's desktop. So you can skype and point at stuff on-screen or the like.
[15:04] Neuro Linden: let's you access someone elses display using an open display protocol
[15:04] Boroondas Gupte: yeah, I remember
[15:04] Soft Linden: I also know a lot of the sldevers are averse to voice communication in general.
[15:04] Neuro Linden: cross platform too \o/
[15:04] Able Whitman: Maybe for JIRA issues where an opensource contributor posts a patch, there's 3 subtasks that need to be included: submit test plan, do code review, execute test plan
[15:05] Able Whitman: and then issues are imported to LL once those 3 subtasks are complete
[15:05] Dzonatas Sol: Voice is fine, it just isn't effective for me
[15:05] Able Whitman: of course some small / trivial patches might not need a test plan, but i think they all need code r eviews
[15:05] Soft Linden: Would it be enough to have a template for a test plan and an explanation of the patch that's part of the patch submission, and then just having another sldever with at least 2-3 patches in sign off on the patch and writeup?
[15:06] Able Whitman: I think that would be great, yes. A standardized patch submission template would be very nice to have
[15:06] Dzonatas Sol: Soft, yes. How about the responsibility of the sign off... how do we address that issue?
[15:07] Able Whitman: I think most of the value of a test plan is in getting the patch submitter to think about breaking their code changes, and hopefully catching some possible bugs in their patch in the process
[15:07] Able Whitman: Not that executing a test plan isn't important of course :)
[15:08] Soft Linden: Yeah. That's how it is internally too. You could just as well explain your patch to a stuffed bear and have 90% of the positive value. Having to explain to a peer just proves you did it. :)
[15:08] Able Whitman nods
[15:08] Boroondas Gupte: lol
[15:08] Dzonatas Sol: gotcha =)
[15:09] Soft Linden: I'll start with a template then, and rehash some of this on-list. I'm not sure how to say who can/should sign off on a patch once the template's filled out, but we can get ideas on list and then take a swing at it next week.