launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Guilherme Salgado <salgado@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 10/02/12 05:00, Jonathan Lange wrote:
> 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

I'd be happy to do that, but this is one of the things that's very
likely to give me a diff with a net positive, just like the cleanup I
did yesterday (bug 888010, which was listed below as something that
would reduce LOC).

> 
>>  - 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


-- 
Guilherme Salgado <https://launchpad.net/~salgado>