[gmx-developers] 4.6.1 is out

[David van der Spoel]

On 2013-03-06 01:46, Szilárd Páll wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 9:00 PM, Mark Abraham <mark.j.abraham at gmail.com
> <mailto:mark.j.abraham at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Hi developers,
>
>     4.6.1 is now out. I'd like to give a particular thanks to all who
>     helped review the patches.
>
>     In future, we will use a different process for patch releases. I
>     will announce a date about a week in the future. I will prepare a
>     single administrative patch pertaining only to the needs of making
>     that release functional. I'll upload it for review in the usual way.
>     Once time is up, and if there are no known critical bugs, that admin
>     patch will go on the current head and get merged and tagged. There
>     will be no other sort of "blocking" patches - targets on Redmine are
>     not binding. Then I will do the admin of actually building release
>     files and normal life in gerrit can go on. This is the only way we
>     can have regular patch releases based on volunteer code review, and
>     keep your release manager sane. :-)
>
>
> A bit more code reviewing involvement would be nice, though. After the
> 4.6 release the activity has sharply dropped and even trivial patched do
> not get looked at for a long time.
>
> Additionally, it does not help at all that the issue management
> discussion has been completely abandoned and it is even for rather
> active developers (like me) very difficult to know what are the top
> issues to look at. For instance, if I was able to filter in Redmine
> issues that have fixes/related code in gerrit that is nominated for the
> next release, or issues that require feedback, I myself could help more
> in time when other tasks require most of my attention.
>
> Right now there are still 35 issues left with target release 4.6.1 which
> does no good in knowing what is the status of things and will ultimately
> only deter developers from checking such a rather unmaintained database.
>
> IMHO before the release all issues that did not make it should get
> bumped. Additionally, whether the release gets slightly delayed or not
> should be dependent on the state of urgent or immediate bugs nominated
> for the respective release (and not on how annoyed you got with people
> not reviewing) - and right now there are quite of few of these reports,
> some of them just forgotten, I assume.
>
> Te me it seems clear that things could be considerably improved by
> improving the infrastructure (like redmine+the long ignored question of
> issue management and gerrit/git-redmine interaction)
>
> My 2 cents, feel free to ignore it.

Code reviewing can be sped up by adding reviewers. The person that 
submits a gerrit patch usually has a decent idea of who might know the 
code sufficiently well to review it. We should however share the load 
and not dump everything on e.g. Berk. I usually add two to three people 
to patches, which means they get mail at least once.

As regards management, a tighter integration of redmine and gerrit might 
be useful but is that possible without a lot of work?


>
> Cheers,
> Sz.
>
>
>     Cheers,
>
>     Mark
>
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>
>
>


-- 
David van der Spoel, Ph.D., Professor of Biology
Dept. of Cell & Molec. Biol., Uppsala University.
Box 596, 75124 Uppsala, Sweden. Phone:	+46184714205.
spoel at xray.bmc.uu.se    http://folding.bmc.uu.se