[GHC DevOps Group] State of CI

Thu Jun 7 08:22:40 UTC 2018

The first point I think is reasonable, being independent of any one code
review tool would be an advantage. However, I'm prepared to sacrifice that,
because I think the conclusion it leads to is suboptimal - that code review
discussion is ephemeral, and we cannot rely on having access to it after
the code is committed.

To make this concrete, I picked out some examples of diffs I've been
involved in recently. I'm sure there are plenty more examples like this:

https://phabricator.haskell.org/D42 (click on "Show Older Comments" to see
all the discussion)
https://phabricator.haskell.org/D4327
https://phabricator.haskell.org/D4324
https://phabricator.haskell.org/D4679
https://phabricator.haskell.org/D4644
https://phabricator.haskell.org/D4722
https://phabricator.haskell.org/D4302

The discussion here is substantial and I would be really sad to lose it,
and I think its relevance goes beyond just the people involved in the
review. Note the cross-referencing between diffs, the links to code, the
comments on particular code fragments, and links to pastes hosted by
Phabricator. It's definitely a lot more than just small-scale suggestions
for improvements or refactoring.

We also have cross-references from Trac tickets to Phabricator diffs, and
every diff committed contains a link to the code review (I use these links
a lot). There are links to Phabricator from mailing lists and wiki pages.

So we could stop doing this, and discuss only on Trac tickets or mailing
lists. (wiki is not good for discussion). After all, that's what we used to
do before code review, and we managed. But I think to do that would be a
loss - GHC development has felt a lot more engaging since we added code
review, and restricting it to ephemeral discussion would curtail its
potential dramatically. I'd have to think twice before writing a comment on
a diff - if I want to discuss something about the overall approach, I'd
have to leave a link to Trac (and create a ticket if there wasn't one),
which is a huge faff.

Ok, so I've made my case. This is not me stamping my foot and saying "we
must do it this way" by any means!  If there's consensus to change things
then I'll happily adjust my workflows.

Cheers
Simon

On 7 June 2018 at 07:39, Manuel M T Chakravarty <manuel.chakravarty at tweag.io
> wrote:

> I very much feel like SimonPJ about this.
>
> Moreover, I think, there are two important technical reasons to prefer
> this style. Firstly, I don’t want to be dependent on any one code review
> tool. The lock-in that Phabricator has been able to create here is quite
> tiresome (even if Phacility is probably quite happy about the situation).
>
> Secondly, I’d be willing to bet that the history in code reviews is useful
> only to very few people, namely those who participated in the respective
> code reviews. This is in direct opposition to creating an open project,
> which tries to level the playing field as far as possible. Hence, IMHO it
> runs counter to the aims of this group.
>
> And, SimonM, as you bring up the differences between open-source and
> closed source. I agree that this would be less of an issue in a closed
> source project. However, I always thought, we want to make contributing to
> GHC as easy as possible.
>
> Cheers,
> Manuel
>
> Am 06.06.2018 um 23:47 schrieb Simon Peyton Jones via Ghc-devops-group <
> ghc-devops-group at haskell.org>:
>
> Interestingly, I think this discussion has really teased out a key
> difference - perhaps the reason people prefer different tools here is
> because they're starting from different perspectives about what the tools
> are for?
>
> I think you are right here.   Personally, I find that Phab focuses my
> attention on the **code**, rather than the design or architecture.  Even
> where discussions about the latter happen, they are buried in a sea of
> noise about low-level suggestions.   So my personal preference is to keep
> the higher level stuff on Trac (or even a wiki page) and regard the code
> review discussion as ephemeral.
>
> Simon
>
> *From:* Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com>
> *Sent:* 06 June 2018 13:44
> *To:* Simon Peyton Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com>
> *Cc:* Manuel M T Chakravarty <manuel.chakravarty at tweag.io>;
> ghc-devops-group at haskell.org
> *Subject:* Re: [GHC DevOps Group] State of CI
>
>
> I think this reflects a different philosophy about code review. If we say
> that code-review is only for small-scale suggestions about the actual code
> changes, then yes I'd agree it's not all that useful to keep that history
> around. But we can (and sometimes do) have high-level architectural
> discussions as part of code review too, and indeed I think it's arguably
> the right thing to have these discussion around concrete code proposals. We
> keep all the discussion of the code in one place, and the discussion is
> attached to the evolving code patches.  In this world, the code discussions
> really are valuable history.
>
>
>
> Interestingly, I think this discussion has really teased out a key
> difference - perhaps the reason people prefer different tools here is
> because they're starting from different perspectives about what the tools
> are for?  I don't think there's one true way here. Personally I've been
> exposed to multiple different working styles, especially having one foot in
> industry and one in the open-source world, and I've seen different
> philosophies that work.  We could as a project decide that we don't want to
> go the way of having high-level discussion alongside code review, in which
> case that's OK (I would slightly prefer to move in the other direction, but
> that's just my preference).
>
>
>
> Cheers
>
> Simon
>
>
>
>
>
> On 6 June 2018 at 12:58, Simon Peyton Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com> wrote:
>
> 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>:
>
>
> * 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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