[cdwg] Pending items to land on Lustre Tree

[Jones, Peter A]

Hi Kevin

I appreciate that you will be busy with ISC looming and so likely won't get to the review of the patches for a while. I had a quieter morning so I did an audit of the Xyratex master patches.

I found that there are three patches ready to land - LU3096, LU-2212 and LU-2479. Oleg has been getting caught up with landings to master now that 2.4 is GA and I have asked him to prioritize these three for consideration.

In addition, there are six patches are waiting for reviews from Intel engineers. Three of these relate to new features(LU-2488, LU-2869, and LU-2854) and three are bugs (LU-3399, LU-3277, and LU-1715). All feature landings have been on hold during the feature freeze, but now those should start moving. Some of the bugs have been waiting a few weeks for reviews – sorry about that, but engineers such as Oleg and Andreas are very busy. We'll get some attention to these as soon as possible and the reason that they are so overloaded is that their feedback is worth the wait :-)

There is one patch (LU-3155) just uploaded yesterday that is still running through regression testing

One patch(LU-901) failed regression tests and the Intel engineer responsible has not yet advised whether the failure is related to the proposed patch or not – sorry about that! I have followed up with the engineer to ensure that this is made clear in the ticket what the next steps should be.

Finally, I discovered that a patch for LU-1409 had slipped through the net because it had been uploaded into gerrit against a closed JIRA ticket with no associated comment being made in the JIRA ticket and no reviewers being added. It's not quite clear to me whether this is follow on work or really a new issue. I have posted a question on the JIRA ticket with a view to getting this cleared up and we will take action accordingly.

As Chris suggested, there are also a number of other patches which are waiting for revisions or clarifications from Xyratex engineers. As part of your internal review it would be great to mark those which are not relevant to current master to be marked as deprecated so that we can focus on those patches that are important.

Thanks

Peter


On 6/11/13 11:12 AM, "Kevin Canady" <kevin_canady at xyratex.com<mailto:kevin_canady at xyratex.com>> wrote:

Hi Chris,
Thank you very much, great feedback.  I agree with your sentiments that keeping the machine moving requires proper submissions.  Thus, i have asked us to review internally prior to truly making this an issue for CDWG to discuss.  My motivation is to keep this transparent to encourage others to also contribute.  Xyratex has made many submissions which have landed and will continue to do so.  I'm sure the actual count is going to change since it will remain fluid as new fixes and submissions are made ready and upstreamed.  It's a constant effort.  The point of the number is that it was large enough to warrant some attention. The action for the moment is ours to clarify and clean up and then confirm to move forward.

As you rightly point out we should not put undue burden on gatekeeping or release to clean up work of others so it is important process is followed.   The goal is, if done properly, quality submissions will land quickly and be the benefit of all.

Thank you again for the feedback, I'm encouraged rather than feeling pain, just want to make sure we are going down the right path, in the right forum.

Many thanks, look forward to picking this up in a few weeks after ISC.

Cheers,
Kevin


P. Kevin Canady
Director, Business Development Lustre and HPC Services
kevin_canady at xyratex.com<mailto:kevin_canady at xyratex.com>
415.505.7701



On Jun 11, 2013, at 10:56 AM, "Christopher J. Morrone" <morrone2 at llnl.gov<mailto:morrone2 at llnl.gov>> wrote:

Kevin,

One thing that we should probably clarify is that you do not necessarily have "65 items which are pending landing".  You may have 65 items submitted to the patch review system, but that doesn't mean that they are pending landing yet.  I would say that a patch is only in the "pending landing" state when it has gotten all required positive reviews, and had the gatekeeper reviewer assigned.

Pushing our patches to the review system is easy; addressing all of the faults in our patches that are found by the reviewers is often difficult and/or time consuming.   But this process of review is one of the best tools that we have to maintain and improve the code quality in lustre.

I would suggest that the first step for your guys are:

1) Complete all work required by the patch reviewers.

2) Refresh all patches that no longer apply cleanly.

3) If steps 1 and 2 are complete, and the patch is not getting attention, have a conversation in the associated Jira ticket.

4) Finally, if having a conversation in Jira does not achieve satisfaction, bring the issue to the attention of the CDWG through the cdwg mailing list.

I have spotted several patches from Xyratex that haven't met steps 1 or 2, let alone 3.  On one recent patch, a Xyratex developer flat out refused to rebase an out of date patch, and insisted that Intel do it for them.  That attitude needs to be addressed.  It is the patch submitter's responsibility to get his patch into proper shape for landing, not the patch reviewer's responsibility.

Yes, this process can be long and even tedious at times.  I understand.  I feel your pain.  I have had simple patches that I have needed to rebase several times because of other patches that landed before mine, introducing a conflict for my patch.  But that is just a natural result of many people working together in the same areas of code.

We can't possibly shift all of that work work up the chain to the top reviewers or the gatekeeper.  That would be a fundamentally unscalable approach to software development.  They can't possibly handle the work load.  That is why the patch submitter must take on the responsibility of seeing the patch through to 100% completion.

So I could be wrong, but I suspect that a much smaller number of those 65 patches that you mentioned are really ready to be discussed by the broader CDWG.

But once your internal review is complete, and you have completed the steps that I've listed, we are happy to discuss any patches that you feel are being ignored!

Chris

On 06/11/2013 09:34 AM, Kevin Canady wrote:
Chris, Peter and anyone else appropriate.

I'm looking for suggestions on how to review and proceed with items awaiting landing.  Some of them are over 24months old.  I have a list of 65 items which are pending landing.   Hopefully these contributions will further enhance and improve the Lustre experience for everyone.   I've requested, first, an internal review to make sure all contributions are valid, complete and have been properly submitted.

Once that is done what is the best course for reviewing these items in order to bring them to a close (landed)?

Should we post the list with ticket numbers to CDWG?

Appreciate thoughts and suggestions.
Kevin


P. Kevin Canady
Director, Business Development Lustre and HPC Services
kevin_canady at xyratex.com<mailto:kevin_canady at xyratex.com>
O: 510-687-5475
C: 415.505.7701 (best)



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