Gerrit Contributions

SGaist

@Chris-Kawa Not my line of thought at all. I'm really interested about what trouble can make a seasoned programmer like you abandon the idea of contributing. I thought that the fact that you are working on Windows could be part of it because setting up keys and such stuff on that platform is not as straightforward as it is from Linux or macOS as well as the build dependencies are usually completely absent by default from that platform.
I've been through the ssh key setup process on Windows for other purpose and I thought afterward that I was pretty lucky when setting up for my first contribution on macOS even though at that time I found the process daunting. The documentation has improved but still, it's not as easy as anybody would like.

@kshegunov I'm just throwing some ideas to to try to find a process that could bring difficulties down maybe have some sort of "Windows pack installer" that you could download to help you setup more easily for contribution.
You should add a ping comment on your patch, that's what I usually do when it starts to stale.

tekojo

If you people don't mind, I'll just point our R&D management to this thread.

It has a lot of familiar material in it, but the fact that we have very capable developers who find the process too complicated is something we really should be fixing.

Konstantin Tokarev

@kshegunov said in Gerrit Contributions:

And even then there's the possibility the patches are left hanging in gerrit.

If patch is left hanging, it's your responsibility to bring attention of reviewers to it.

Though we could have a "remind bot" that would post automatic message in case there is no activity on review in e.g. 2 weeks, and if nothing happens in the next 2 weeks after message, move patch to deferred state

Konstantin Tokarev

Also we could have a reviewer suggestion bot that adds all developers that might be relevant for each patch that is hanging unreviewed for, say, more than 3 days.

SGaist

@tekojo as long as R&D doesn't mean Research & Destroy ;)

@Konstantin-Tokarev I like the idea of the second bot. It can be pretty hard to know whether the people you try to select are currently active or part of the project.

Konstantin Tokarev

BTW, in WebKit project we have configuration file that allows people to be added to review automatically if patch touches file matching specific patterns [1]. Gerrit has a similar feature for watching changes, but watchers are not publicly shown on the review page, so patch author cannot know whom to ping if there is no response.

[1] https://github.com/WebKit/webkit/blob/master/Tools/Scripts/webkitpy/common/config/watchlist

kshegunov

@SGaist said in Gerrit Contributions:

You should add a ping comment on your patch, that's what I usually do when it starts to stale.

@Konstantin-Tokarev said in Gerrit Contributions:

If patch is left hanging, it's your responsibility to bring attention of reviewers to it.

Will do.

@SGaist said in Gerrit Contributions:

maybe have some sort of "Windows pack installer" that you could download to help you setup more easily for contribution.

Possibly feasible. I don't much work on windows, so our win users should feel free to correct me, but I think this should include setting up the git, somehow generating and uploading the ssh keys and probably installing perl with running the appropriate scripts. Do I miss something? Perhaps a set of dependencies?

@Konstantin-Tokarev said in Gerrit Contributions:

Though we could have a "remind bot" that would post automatic message in case there is no activity on review in e.g. 2 weeks, and if nothing happens in the next 2 weeks after message, move patch to deferred state

Also we could have a reviewer suggestion bot that adds all developers that might be relevant for each patch that is hanging unreviewed for, say, more than 3 days.

Both of those suggestions sound very good to me. What about adding a list of reviewers automatically on first patch upload (following the same logic)?

Chris Kawa

I know little of this is technically feasible (the amount of work to gain ratio) but just for the sake of an idea let me describe what I'd like the process to look like:

I open QtCreator (because why not?), from one of the menus I choose "Contribute"
I'm presented with a wizard that lets me login with my Qt account credentials and accept CLA
The wizard presents a list of development branches and modules I can check (like the Qt installer does), I select some
The wizard downloads stuff (source, dependencies, even git if needed!), sets up git (locally to the downloaded repos!) without me needing to do anything, creates the .pro files and I can just start hacking right away (Visual Studio does things like that so it's not really science fiction)
When I'm done I just push my changes to automatically set up remote and am presented a link to gerrit review page (gerrit integration into QtCreator would be a cherry on the cake).
Done

Btw. Why do we even need perl? I mean maybe it was convenient to use in a linux environment but think about it - we have a giant c++ library, with its own language(QML), which has two custom build systems (qmake and qbs), its own IDE (QtCreator), two (or is it already one now?) Javascript engines, a networking and web browser engines and yet we still need a totally unrelated foreign language runtime just to download the sources. Sounds kinda eccentric.

VRonin

@Chris-Kawa I think your process might move the problem on the other side of gerrit. Making it too easy to propose changes to the code might swamp code reviewers with changes that can't be accepted. Bots could filer out a few of them but probably the burden will increase significantly.

I'd stick with a diff submission portal. preparing a git diff is the kind of thing a seasoned programmer considers trivial but it's not for a newcomer hence filtering out submission by people that might feel too confident in their Qt expertise.

Same goes for the config. I'm not a fan of a 100% automated wizard but it shouldn't take more than 1 or 2 hours to set up the entire thing for a regular Qt user with decent git experience that is looking to contribute for the first time.

Chris Kawa

@VRonin said in Gerrit Contributions:

Bots could filer out a few of them but probably the burden will increase significantly.

I don't claim to have a silver bullet here but I think it's a better problem to have than not having as much contributions because of the process complexity.

I'm not a fan of a 100% automated wizard but it shouldn't take more than 1 or 2 hours to set up the entire thing

Sorry, but if it takes me two hours to set up a submission it might as well take 10, because I'm not gonna do it. I don't think using complexity as newbie deterrent is the way to go.
A diff submission portal would be fine, but it solves only part of the problem. On Windows at least just getting the right sources with all the dependencies set up correctly (paths, environment variables etc.) is a chore.

VRonin

@Chris-Kawa said in Gerrit Contributions:

On Windows at least just getting the right sources with all the dependencies set up correctly (paths, environment variables etc.) is a chore.

Agree it should be simplified a lot

Sorry, but if it takes me two hours to set up a submission it might as well take 10, because I'm not gonna do it

I did not explain myself correctly. What I meant is that from the moment I get the idea of submitting something (while still having only the binary of Qt on my machine) to the moment I submit it, it shouldn't take more than 2 hours (net, of course of the time I spend actually changing the sources) of goggling, reading, downloading setting up and sending. Subsequent submits (i.e. after I already set up my system) should be significantly faster.

I don't think using complexity as newbie deterrent is the way to go.

Probably not, it's the first thing that came to mind to mitigate the resistances of code reviewers, that can face a significant increase in their work burden, to the changes

Konstantin Tokarev

@Chris-Kawa said in Gerrit Contributions:

I don't claim to have a silver bullet here but I think it's a better problem to have than not having as much contributions because of the process complexity.

Note that process may be complex only a first time, when you do your second or third patch you just use existing setup and execute simple git commands. If we make it possible to do "drive-by" contributions without setup, chances are that the person will continue using "drive-by" way, putting extra burden on reviewers.

Konstantin Tokarev

@kshegunov said in Gerrit Contributions:

What about adding a list of reviewers automatically on first patch upload (following the same logic)?

It may create unnecessary noise. There are cases when you know for sure which person needs to review the patch, and there is no need to bother others (unless they are actively subscribed to this change by means of watch list)

Chris Kawa

@Konstantin-Tokarev First time is all it takes to drive a newcomer away. I'm not sure I understand your point. How is a drive-by contribution different from a regular one? The submission and approval process is the same for both. What's the point of limiting it apart from offloading the reviewers? Isn't having many submitters a good thing? Growing community should take priority over mitigating a side effect of its growth I think.

kshegunov

@Konstantin-Tokarev said in Gerrit Contributions:

It may create unnecessary noise. There are cases when you know for sure which person needs to review the patch, and there is no need to bother others (unless they are actively subscribed to this change by means of watch list)

And unless the Qt Company is going to run an exclusive show then most of the time I, or any other unaffiliated/occasional contributor, scroll(s) down a list of git commit history entries and add(s) manually people to the list in gerrit. And to make it worse, I still have no idea whom I'm adding - is he/she active on gerrit, interested in reviewing, etc.
So in fact I'm doing exactly that - bothering people, I don't see any difference between me doing it manually and it being automated.

@Chris-Kawa said in Gerrit Contributions:

First time is all it takes to drive a newcomer away. I'm not sure I understand your point. How is a drive-by contribution different from a regular one? The submission and approval process is the same for both. What's the point of limiting it apart from offloading the reviewers? Isn't having many submitters a good thing?

And I think Chris took a stab at the heart of the issue, leaving the technicalities aside. I'm with him on this one. Isn't the point of Qt being distributed over LGPL to reap the benefits of that open source license, I'd think so, but then why insist on making the contribution process so deterrent that most potential submitters would prefer not to bother with it at all?

Konstantin Tokarev

@kshegunov said in Gerrit Contributions:

And unless the Qt Company is going to run an exclusive show

As you can easily see, this is not the case, lots of people not affiliated with The Qt Company are contributors, approvers and even maintainers of modules.

So in fact I'm doing exactly that - bothering people, I don't see any difference between me doing it manually and it being automated.

There is a difference when you know whom to add.

@Chris-Kawa said in Gerrit Contributions:

I'm not sure I understand your point. How is a drive-by contribution different from a regular one? The submission and approval process is the same for both. What's the point of limiting it apart from offloading the reviewers?

Because if you are not ready to invest a bit of time to learn git (and Gerrit does not use anything else) there is a risk that you won't modify your patches to fix reviewers' comments, or won't write unit tests when needed, or won't make sure that your code is ocmpatible with other platforms. In short, offloading work to approvers and maintainers. Sorry, if this is not the case for you.

VRonin

@Konstantin-Tokarev said in Gerrit Contributions:

Because if you are not ready to invest a bit of time to learn git (and Gerrit does not use anything else) there is a risk that you won't modify your patches to fix reviewers' comments, or won't write unit tests when needed, or won't make sure that your code is ocmpatible with other platforms. In short, offloading work to approvers and maintainers.

I do see your point but drive-by would usually just act on small bugs, things you don't have time to fix because you, correctly, prioritise other stuff letting the odd user that is affected by the bug just fix it himself. This kind of contributors will probably have limited need to write platform-specific code or entire unit tests. things like this: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-57925 which requires a either simple distribution of a parenthesis or a std::is_unsigned check (or both)

Are we veering off track? I think the main point is configuring for contribution (primarily under windows) being too hard is preventing people from contributing altogether

kshegunov

@Konstantin-Tokarev said in Gerrit Contributions:

As you can easily see, this is not the case, lots of people not affiliated with The Qt Company are contributors, approvers and even maintainers of modules.

It was a conditional, I'm not claiming they are. And your note, namely "There is a difference when you know whom to add." just supports it. The fact is that a new contributor doesn't know anyone out there, or they may not even care to, especially if it's a once-in-life thing. My point was that the review process shouldn't be an exclusive club for a group of people who know each other, right? The idea is that it'd be good to have smooth sailing irrespective of whether you're submitting your first patch or are a long-time contributor.

there is a risk that you won't modify your patches to fix reviewers' comments, or won't write unit tests when needed, or won't make sure that your code is ocmpatible with other platforms.

Suppose you're right. For one, as @VRonin hinted, no one is going to waste a day, or two only to submit a 5 line patch, it just ain't gonna happen. Not to mention commercial customers who are not even required to submit their changes, they can just sit on them forever. So even if we accept that there are enough people to handle the major things, they still have limited resources. It's been a complaint (I know you follow the mailing list, but some don't so I put it here for completeness) that there's accumulation of bugs and many just go unresolved for long periods of time. In my mind allowing more people to pitch in, should help alleviate that problem.
And secondly, there's always risk. There's the risk a tree might fell on you while strolling through the park, this shouldn't stop you from having a walk, should it? Suppose it doesn't work in any of the proposed configurations, so what, what is there to lose?

kshegunov

Resurrecting this thread due to Code contributions via bug reports and forum posts being allowed. Users are still encouraged to go through the usual route of setting up gerrit and the code review process however.

VRonin

It would be nice to have a place in the forum where people could just post their “casual contribution” so that someone could pick them up while still being 100% covered under the Qt Account contribution model mentioned in the blog.
Maybe a subforum of https://forum.qt.io/category/48/qt-contribution ?