graphite-dev team mailing list archive

[Chris Davis <chrismd@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hey everyone, I've finally gotten around to reviewing all the branches that
got proposed for merging into trunk. My apologies for everyone who waited so
long for feedback. So all the sudden there are some really cool things in
trunk: Lucio's awesome client-side rendered flot UI, some much needed
refactoring courtesy of Sidnei, also a new lineMode=connected option from
katzj. After a few minor issues are worked out there will be several other
branches merging in soon including lapsu's holtwinters branch, ziggy's
whitelist/blacklist feature, and Sidnei's migration to twistd. Also don't
forget Nick's new second Y-axis feature was just committed to trunk last
week. Also the Dashboard UI in trunk is 10x better than what was put out in
0.9.8. Plenty of awesome stuff to try out, testing & feedback would be much
appreciated.

Despite my best efforts, the vast majority of my work on Graphite lately has
been related to new features rather than docs or bug fixing, which is not
what I intended but thats just how things have played out. This means the
next release will not be a 1.0, too much new stuff coming in that needs time
to bake first. That said, 0.9.9 will probably be ready much sooner than 1.0
would've anyways. I am still trying my best to focus on the documentation
but for various reasons that hasn't been easy lately.

Also I wanted to say that I think that my lack of time to spend on Graphite
in recent weeks has created a bit of a bottleneck for development progress.
I have a proposal for how we can address this, feedback welcomed. If anyone
has a change (bug, branch, crazy idea, whatever) that is awaiting feedback
and I'm not responsive enough to it, feel free to engage the rest of
graphite-dev by emailing this list. Many eyes make all bugs shallow, and
there are some great coders/eyes on this list that can review your changes.
Also remember that every member of graphite-dev has commit access to trunk,
and by virtue of you receiving this message that means you :).

Code submissions generally fall into one of these two categories:

1. A small, targeted change that addresses a specific issue. The change has
a well defined and narrow scope, creates a minimal diff, and has a clear
purpose.
2. An exploratory accretion of ideas, involving design changes or
significant new functionality. Usually these are many changes rolled into
one branch.

What I'd like to see happen, is for more changes of type #1 to get committed
to trunk directly by the author. If you aren't fully confident in your
change, ask someone on graphite-dev or #graphite to review it, simple as
that. But you all have commit access and I'm not afraid of someone
committing something broken once and a while, just go for it. But please try
to put exactly 1 logical change in each commit rather than a bunch of things
in one big commit/merge. This will help speed up development because many
small changes are easier to review & merge than a few mega-changes, which
are very costly to review.

For changes of type #2, I think we should do more upfront discussion to
avoid wasting effort as much as possible. If you've got an idea for Graphite
that you think is cool, but maybe too substantial to just sneak into trunk
under cover of darkness, please send a note to graphite-dev or #graphite so
we can all give feedback, preferably before pouring in lots of effort
writing the code. Sometimes people are already working down parallel paths
but don't even know it because of lack of communication.

tl;dr

Anyways, that's enough of a rant for now. As always, feedback
welcomed. Thanks,

-Chris