launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Paul Hummer <paul.hummer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 24 Jul 2010 21:47:47 +0200
Robert Collins <robert.collins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>   * It is non-trivial to do out-of-transaction events: actions are
> very tightly coupled to their context, either in the DB or in the
> webapp. The jobs systems are of sufficiently high friction that they
> aren't the first tool developers reach for, and so they aren't
> immediately useful

I'm curious why you think that the job system is "of sufficiently high
friction."  It's commonly the first tool I reach for.  Granted it could
make improvements like using messaging instead of cron jobs, but that's
an issue that spans Launchpad.

> The ugly:
>  - we have really high friction around making changes, which leads to
> both not doing small twaks and big changes which are high risk which
> leads to.. more friction. The new merge and deployment stories will
> help a lot, but also, I think we need to really just make it easy to
> improve things. Curtis gave a great lightning talk at the Epic
> covering how small changes led to him doing the most bug fixes per
> month-long cycle: we should all do more of that.

I have also been experimenting specifically with this recently, and I
can +1 what Curtis asserted at the Epic.  If your change has high
friction, it will take a while to write, be a pain in the ass
(affecting your overall morale), and be hard to review and QA.  If you
spend enough time thinking about the change, and splitting that
friction up, then you have many small branches with small amounts of
friction each.

Cheers,
Paul