[GHC DevOps Group] State of CI

[Simon Peyton Jones]

We should keep in mind, though, is that past code reviews is valuable content that we can't discard,

Like Manuel I’m not at all sure about this.

I *do* regard the Trac conversation as a long-term asset, and often refer to tickets from Notes, as a way to say “here’s a more extensive discussion of what’s in the Note”.

But the Phab discussion of “please refactor this or that” seems far less valuable.  And actually I don’t think it is substantially cross-referenced from elsewhere.  Where there is substantive conversation about the approach, I’d rather see that on Trac.

So for me, long term access to the code-review trail is not very important

Simon

From: Ghc-devops-group <ghc-devops-group-bounces at haskell.org> On Behalf Of Manuel M T Chakravarty
Sent: 06 June 2018 12:50
To: Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com>
Cc: ghc-devops-group at haskell.org
Subject: Re: [GHC DevOps Group] State of CI

Am 06.06.2018 um 19:11 schrieb Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com<mailto:marlowsd at gmail.com>>:

* None of this work is GitHub specific. Nor all that CircleCI or
Appveyor specific for that matter (work is currently focused on
improving the test suite).
* Our GitHub lock-in factor is currently low to pretty much absent,
and would remain low even if the review workflow becomes more
systematically GitHub centric (it already is for some small
contributions).
* That's because tickets remain on Trac, and the code along with the
entirety of its history remains in a standard Git repository, GitHub
or not. Also because GitHub is not a CI provider, those providers we
do use integrate with other code hosting solutions (e.g. Appveyor with
GitLab), and the surface area of CI provider-specific code is small.

We should keep in mind, though, is that past code reviews is valuable content that we can't discard, nor can we easily migrate it to a different code review platform. At this point we have nearly 5K diffs on Phabricator, many of which have non-trivial code-review trails, and these are cross-referenced from Trac, emails, and other places. Even if we moved to github, we would want to keep Phabricator running so that we have access to this content, and people will experience friction though havng to deal with another system.

To me, the friction caused by the transition and the inability to do a clean move is more worrying than the missing code review functionality on github.

Actually, to me this is a red flag. Core reviews shouldn’t be essential documentation. I wonder what has been going wrong so that we have got to this situation.

If important points are uncovered or documented in code reviews, that information should be included in either the source code or associated documentation. (Having git history as an important record for the evolution of the code is fine as it is now standard to not only have one snapshot of the source, but a source control history of the source as the definitive record of a piece of software. And as we painfully discover, much in contrast to code reviews, the source control history is recorded in a widely understood standard format.)

Cheers,
Manuel

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