launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 12:57 AM, Robert Collins
<robertc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 12:49 PM, Guilherme Salgado
> <salgado@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> I think that's going to be challenging. My gut reaction would be to look for
>>
>>  1. Code that's no longer used and can be removed
>>  2. Duplicated code which could be moved to a common base
>>  3. Code that could be written in a simpler way
>>
>> Now, just searching for this kind of stuff takes some time, and there
>> probably aren't many occurrences of 1 left, so I'd probably focus on 2
>> and 3, which certainly abound, although there's no guarantee that I'll
>> have a net negative until after the refactor/rewrite is done. That means
>> I may end up spending a day on something just to realize it'll have a
>> net negative of a dozen lines or so. That is certainly an improvement to
>> Launchpad, but to me (Linaro, in fact) it's mostly wasted effort as it
>> didn't take us significantly closer to our goal.
>
> There is a 4: extract or delete code that shouldn't be part of LP
> core. We have a -raft- of 'helpers' (e.g. the thing for running
> subprocesses) which are either:
> a) uninterestingly different to other helpers on pypi
> b) interestingly different but embedded in the LP code base so that
> no-one else can use them
> c) interestingly different but not pulling their weight
>
> These things can be pulled out to separate reusable projects, or just
> removed entirely and migrated away from.
>
> and 5: remove code that is used but is a net negative. (e.g. polls)
>
> In the last week I've seen 2 commits doing (1), one doing (2), and
> there is one for (3) about to land. I estimate about 15% of LP is
> covered by (4), and another 10%-15% by 5.
>
> Here are some ideas that should (possibly each on their own) easily
> offset your project:
>  - remove the massive duplication between modules in the blueprints
> subsystem; last I checked about 30% of the code in there was verbatim
> copies between different contexts.
>  - move most of utilities/* to the lpdevtools project - thats 6K LOC on its own
>  - extract poppy to a separate project (it no longer needs to talk to
> the DB, so has no need to be part of LP)

Ditto parts of codehosting.

Perhaps the librarian?

>  - remove polls (not a trivial thing politically, but I'm sure mrevell
> is able to clear the way)
>  - move the ec2 land/test logic to lpdevtools

Actually, splitting much of it into its own project would probably be
a good idea. We ended up re-implementing a chunk of it, sort of, for
pkgme development.

>  - delete the representation cache from lazr.restful (there is a bug
> open for this)
>  - delete all uses of memcache except for the one for the blog on the front page

And since it's Salgado, we could perhaps add "clean up
distribution_mirrorprober & tests". :P

>  - do the duplicate code part of bug 531720
>  - do bug 125637
>  - bug 614275
>  - bug 706129
>  - bug 708736 (should pay for itself via test cleanups)
>  - bug 888010
>  - bug 4449
>
> (those bugs come from the first page of tech-debt bugs for launchpad
> itself; there may be more if we consider launchpad-project...)

I missed this discussion because I'm not particularly interested in
migrating blueprint work items from whiteboards (although I think it's
a super idea and am glad someone else is doing it).

Should there be a wiki page with these ideas, or is the tech-debt tag
sufficient?

jml