On 14 February 2013 11:33, David Kastrup
<address@hidden> wrote:
Graham Percival <
address@hidden> writes:
> On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 09:26:45AM +0100, David Kastrup wrote:
>> James <
address@hidden> writes:
>>
>> > Anyway, assuming that no one else offers, I'll take a look and make
>> > a start of it on Wednesday.
>>
>> I certainly think you a good fit for that position. The problem is
>> that you are a good fit for a _lot_ of positions, and, for example,
>> make very good and thorough manual patch reviews.
>
> I echo those concerns. It should take 15-30 minutes a week. It's
> a purely mechanical secretary job. Trivial for a non-developer to
> learn.
Colin has been doing and the rather thorough start James had made. It
is not a "purely mechanical" job since it involves reading the reviews
and judging when concerns have been addressed and when not and what to
best do about that. The advantage of the job over the "Patchy review"
job is that it does not involve installing or compiling any software.
At any rate, I've been offloading that job because I was getting
overwhelmed. Now part of the reason is that I don't necessarily have
the best personality to deal with that kind of responsibility and
conflict of interest. But part of it _is_ that it definitely is a
non-trivial amount of work and judgment, and that is why Colin needed a
sabbatical from it.
I'll pitch in with Patchy reviews somewhat to compensate, but I think
that James is currently taking more of a load than I think good in the
long term.
I know that Colin trawled all the email lists whereas I am only looking at Dev and Bug (which I am subscribed to) it does need some judgement, but only to not offend by pushing a patch to 'needs work' mistakenly or letting a patch through to countdown because you miss a response on an email list and not on Rietveld or the Tracker.
Testing patches obviously takes time but I am very used to it now and the recent python scripts have helped a *lot* - fire and forget, mostly the CPUs do all the work, and apart from the odd case of a failing make check (where it can be tricky to fathom the multi-processes in the log files for specific errors to help analyse the issue) it's pretty straight forward now, and as long as people don't mind downloading the FTP links for those reg diffs that are significant in size (I can't think of a better way to do that) that I cannot attach to the Tracker, then it's not that big a load as you might think.
While Colin did his patch review on specific days, it's easier (for me) to do mine on a 3 day roll regardless of the Day of the week. Just shifting things up/down/off the list.
At the moment I can handle this and I see no reason that I won't be able to in the future, the only issue for the team is when I am away - on holiday for instance - patchy merge can keep running as that just ticks away in the background,
In the end it is still better that developers develop and people like me do the boring but necessary admin stuff.
Let's see how it goes.
James