Monthly Archives: August 2007

In Florida

This week I am in Florida for a Launchpad sprint. I was meant to arrive on Sunday night, but I fell asleep in the boarding lounge and missed the San Francisco → Orlando flight (the flight out of Perth was an early morning one, and I didn’t get enough sleep on the plane). The earliest alternative fligh was the same time the next day, so I ended up ariving on Monday night.

I can’t say I was impressed with United’s customer service though. I was directed to the customer service centre in the airport and queued up behind about 10 other people. After a short while, the one staff member at the desk announced that her shift was over and that her replacements would not be arriving for another hour. It seems like really bad management to leave the desk unattended for an hour, particularly when they knew that there were people waiting.

They had a bunch of check-in computers which were supposed to let you change your flight details, so I gave one of these a try.  Unfortunately, the computers directed me to pick up the phone to talk to a representative, and the representative ended up directing me to talk to someone at the customer service centre.  After waiting for the next shift, things got sorted out okay though, which was good.

This was also my first experience with SSSS screening.  In fact I got to experience it twice: once when checking in for the flight I missed, and again for the later flight.  On my way back to Australia, I’ll have two more flights leaving from US airports so it’ll be interesting to see what happens then.

Canonical Shop Open

The new Canonical Shop was opened recently which allows you to buy anything from Ubuntu tshirts and DVDs up to a 24/7 support contract for your server.

One thing to note is that this is the first site using our new Launchpad single sign-on infrastructure. We will be rolling this out to other sites in time, which should give a better user experience to the existing shared authentication system currently in place for the wikis.

Bazaar bundles as part of a review process

In my previous article, I outlined Bazaar‘s bundle feature. This article describes how the Bazaar developers use bundles as part of their development and code review process.

Proposed changes to Bazaar are generally posted as patches or bundles to the development mailing list. Each change is discussed on the mailing list (often going through a number of iterations), and ultimately approved or rejected by the core developers. To aide in managing these patches Aaron Bentley (one of the developers wrote a tool called Bundle Buggy.

Bundle Buggy watches messages sent to the mailing list, checking for messages containing patches or bundles. It then creates an entry on the web site displaying the patch, and lets developers add comments (which get forwarded to the mailing list).

Now while Bundle Buggy can track plain patches, a number of its time saving features only work for bundles:

  1. Automatic rejection of superseded patches: when working on a feature, it is common to go through a number of iterations. When going through the list of pending changes, the developers don’t want to see all the old versions. Since a bundle describes a Bazaar branch, and it is trivial to check if one branch is an extension of another though, Bundle Buggy can tell which bundles are obsolete and remove them from the list.
  2. Automatically mark merged bundles as such: the canonical way to know that a patch has been accepted is for it to be merged to mainline. Each Bazaar revision has a globally unique identifier, so we can easily check to see if the head revision of the bundle is in the ancestry of mainline. When this happens, Bundle Buggy automatically marks them as merged.

Using these techniques the list of pending bundles is kept under control.

Further Possibilities

Of course, these aren’t the only things that can be done to save time in the review process. Another useful idea is to automatically try and merge pending bundles or branches to see if they can still be merged without conflicts. This can be used as a way to put the ball back in the contributors court, obligating them to fix the problem before the branch can be reviewed.

This sort of automation is not only limited to projects using a mailing list for code review. The same techniques could be applied to a robot that scanned bug reports in the bug tracker (e.g. Bugzilla) for bundles, and updated their status accordingly.