Meeting Minutes for May 27th, 2012

This was our first official meeting for GSoC! We’re pleased to welcome Bogdana Popa to the project, and welcome back Steven MacLeod.

The nature of their projects will be made more apparent in future blogposts from the both of them.

• A general announcement – there’s a big change going on in the codebase right now; RB is changing its model a bit to have a core concept of hosting services and accounts (with things like API token storage) for those services.
  • This is in response to GitHub changing their API (which we require for fetching files from GitHub to show diffs) in a way that’s incompatible with what we have today
  • Reviews are the key thing to help with this. Testing wouldn’t hurt either if you wanted to spend the time.
  • A final patch should be up this week.
  • These changes will likely have an impact on Steven’s project, since they will give us the ability to start doing things like better DVCS integration with these services, which will affect the API and what tools we’ll need.
• From Bogdana
  • Just came back from a holiday in Japan, and ready to tear into her project.
  • Have started coming up with solutions for the activity feed
  • Stumbled on a Django App that we might want to incorporate, or at the very least, emulate.
    • We need to study this – we’ve been broken by third-party things before…
  • Has started a rough implementation of the action feed with the app – patch should be up for perusal sometime this week.
    • This sort of thing is good fodder for the blog!
  • Q: My proposition was to add an activity feed as a Dashboard entry, but it doesn’t seem like it fits in there since the other entries are based on the datagrid.
    • A: That’s true, but they don’thave to be based on the datagrid.
    • Depending on the entry, it actually branches off into different views (all datagrids, but only because that’s what we’ve been showing so far)
  • Q: Should I leave the activity feed in the Dashboard and try to get around the datagrids, or should we introduce it as a separate menu item?
    • A: Leave it in the Dashboard, and make it the top entry
    • The view would basically be doing “if view_name == ‘activity’: return activity_view()
  • Q: When upgrading to this feature, should we also populate the activity feed with events from the past?
    • A: No, let’s only do it for new things.
• From Steven
  • Working through the asynchronous stuff for the API.
  • Still trying to figure out how asynchronous stuff works in Python
  • Q: Asynchronous implies multi-threaded?
    • A: Not necessarily, no. It can be done many ways, in response to events, in a mainloop, multi-process…
  • Q: What should I use for urllib2? Threads?
    • A: Ignore threads for now. Design for async usage without making it async yet.
    • We’ll likely end up providing something like a gevent backend for the data transfer, which will do our async stuff.
    • You should be able to design a proper async API without having to have an async backend yet.
  • There are some outstanding review requests from last semester still waiting for review!
    • Let’s not forget about ReviewBot, people.
• Bogdana also has some review requests up there. Let’s clear those out.
• Contact ChipX86 if you want an IRC bouncer (irssi running on ChipX86′s server)
  • ZNC is another pretty painless solution.

Meeting Minutes for April 7th, 2012

Not Present: Curtis

Admin:

• This was the last official meeting.
• Students are encouraged to continue contributing to the Review Board community.
• Optional post-mortem meeting scheduled for next week same time (Sat, April 14th – 5pm EST)

Meeting:

• Anthony needs his outstanding requests reviewed.
• Dave discovered selectstart for inline editor didn’t work in webkit.
• Steve needs reviews on extension doc (r/2950) and Web Hooks (r/2855). Mike thinks Web Hooks should be Ship It!
• Steve wants to discuss Review Bot, but it can be post UCOSP.
• Wilson was having problems with the datagrid.
• Mike suggested Wilson check out best-way-to-do-an-a-z-list-in-django
• Jim needs someone to take a look at r/2966. His patch also had problems, but syncing with master should fix
• Jim needs a ship it for r/3033
• Mike will be ‘peeling’ into reviews today, including r/3033
• Yazan’s issue summary table change has taken extra time due to lack of response on review requests.
• Yazan’s incremental expansion had to be pushed back a bit, update will be posted tonight/tomorrow.
• Weilul’s r/2891 patch has bitrotted, he’s going to fix this up.
• Steering committee requires evaluations on the 12th, soft pencils down date is the 10th/11th.

In Closing:

• Students should start thinking now about what can be improved for future students, and bring it up in post-mortem.
• Big group hug, students and mentors were thanked.

Meeting Minutes for March 31st, 2012

Not Present: Curtis

Administrative

• Finish coding by April 11th
• If cannot finish, document your work so someone can pick it up easily

Meeting

• Yazan: Doing well, just needs some reviews.
• Dave: Figured solution/direction for r2991.
• Steven: Needed a review bot repo added to r.rb.org.  Needs some reviews r3020, r2855.
• Jim: Consolidating get_chunks. reviewtags.py now has a location in changedescs/templatetags
• Anthony: Concern with conflicting code with Yazan.
• Willer: Problem with “./reviewboard manage.py”, no real damage.  Still having problems with unit testing.
• Wilson: Chosen a wireframe. Will continue to code r3030.

Side Notes

• “git pull” = “git fetch merge”
• Help with reviewing!
• Steven now has the ReviewBot repo

Meeting Minutes for March 24th, 2012

Announcements:

• Review Board has been listed as one of the participating organizations in the Google Summer of Code 2012. Applications will be taken starting Monday, March 26th.

Wilson

• Busy, but working on Weekly Headlines.
• Will get it working in the terminal first, then convert the output to email format.

Yazan

• Roadblock is cleared.
• Yazan should update the CSS for in-progress reviews.

Curtis

• Christian’s changes went integrated smoothly into r2810.
• Mike would like to see a a work in progress update for the rating extension. Curtis will post something before the next meeting.

Willer

• Having some trouble making the wire frames for the submitters, currently using MS Paint, cant get the spacing right. Mike will help with this after the meeting.
• Mike will offer some guidance on r2828 after the meeting.
• Not sure if it is realistic to finish issue 829.

Dave

• Still needs a review on r2918.
• Would like to find out more about JS event binding.
• The element has to be made “draggable” to use onselectstart binding. This makes it physically drag around with the mouse.
• “select” is the best candidate for an event to bind.

Jim

• Needs a review on r3001.
• Publishing a discarded review request will reopen it. Submitted review requests will be reopened/updated.
• Needs a review on r2966, specifically diffutils.py.
• Would like to discuss r3000 with Christian when he is available.
• Will be looking for something to do for the last week. Will either consider making a screen-cast, or go through the issue tracker for small bugs/enhancements to implement.

Steven

• Will file an issue for a when a draft is in the review request list, but can’t be published.
• For reviewbot, I want a non-blocking way to execute code analysis after receiving the request. Also looking for opinions on how to do this.
• Celery is the recommended way to accomplish this.
• Reviewbot should just be restricted to only the files that were changed.
• The scope of the reviewbot project is too big, and Steven wont be able to have a fully functioning review bot to the initial standards he had hoped.
• Webhooks extension is close, code reviews on it would be beneficial.

Anthony

• Received a code review, no longer blocked on that, and can move forward and make changes.
• Not sure what to do for the full-file review project, due to the time limitations. Might be able to finish the project after the deadline/exams.

Meeting Minutes for March 17th, 2012

Reminders:

• We have 3 more meetings before wrapping up, depending on the size/scope of your project, you may want to reserve the last week to polish and document your project
• If you don’t think you’re going to be able to finish your projects, it’s critical that you inform one of the mentors
• Status reports should posted at least one hour before the meeting, so please send them ASAP

Anthony

• Framework should be able to handle additional mimetypes through extensions
• Thumbnails will be rendered as HTML allowing the author to decide on the looks
• Generate a new comment class for full-file review comments

Steven

• Requested reviews on extension documentation
• ReviewBot next top priority

Jim

• Requested review on r2966
• Will be knocking off bugs till the end of the semester or picking up one of Christian’s suggested projects

Yazan

• Static media should be placed in “/reviewboard/static”, htdocs is off-limits now
• Need to attach “–tracking-branch=origin/master” flag to post-review github branch
• Use imgur.com to post screenshots, get an account to group images

Dave

• Waiting on review request for r2918
• Next project is possibly “better binary files”
• Possibly select one of the projects suggested by Christian along with jimrrchen

Curtis

• Having trouble placing “select_related()” within the code
• “review_request = review_request.select_related(‘diffset_history__diffsets’)” is the gist of the idea,  Christian will provide code in the review

Wilson

• Merge conflict occurred, instructed on how to resolve it
• Some files may have changed locations and may need to re-apply changes
• Mockup “new submitters page” using wireframe to a layout similar to the dashboard’s

Willer

• Requirements for “weekly headlines project” are not clear, approach explained here: “ groups.google.com/group/reviewboard-dev/browse_frm/thread/7efca0ae1e6173fc”
• Had trouble running unit tests, will contact dev mailing list for support

Christian’s suggested projects:

• “if you select text in, say, the description box, it opens, which it shouldn’t do”
• “if you have the box open, and yo udidn’t modify it, you’ll still be asked if you’re sure you want to leave the page, which is painful when trying to close a review request”
• “when someone closes a review request, the update bubble that appears later is that the review request is “updated.” It should be smarter and say it was closed”

Meeting Minutes – March 10, 2012

Administrative Concerns

• Wilson is unable to attend this weekend, but everybody else is in attendance.
• Django upgrade: if you’re still having problems, talk to one m_conley/ChipX86/purple_cow or send a general request to the IRC channel.

Meeting Proper

Curtis

• request for feedback on comment on the open issue (r/2810)
• brief discussion on the proper placement of select_related, i.e., near the construction of the query, and before the query will be instantiated/executed
• tips for fighting coding burnout
  • break up the larger tasks with non-coding tasks or smaller side-tasks with more immediate results
  • deconstruct the large task into smaller chunks/milestones with their own immediate/tangible results. nurture a sense of accomplishment and definite progress.
• hopes to bring Javascript experience into extension frontend

Dave

• issues with naive timezone warnings when passing in __range (snippet)
• python issue (snippet)

New Student Project Idea: reviewable pasting service

Jim

• Busy week, but no roadblocks moving forward

Willer

• discussed proper location of admin command. examples provided using find `reviewboard/ -name management -type d`
• question about blog post: high-level idea of the semester so far for an audience that has a passing knowledge of Review Board, refer to other blog posts for examples.

Yazan

• issue regarding reintroducing a fork from github into a local branch

Anthony

• had this issue (snippet). fix by installing http://osiris.chipx86.com/temp/django_evolution-0.6.6alpha0-py2.7.egg. If having problems with ViewDoesNotExists and group_members, you may wish to edit ./reviewboard/manage.py, go to the bottom and comment out “include_enabled_extensions(settings)”.
• clarified direction of full-file review

Steven

• discussed action log for admin site, selected course of action is to remove the link

Wrap-Up

• reminder that there may be some reviewed requests that haven’t been updated yet, so check in on any pending requests.

Meeting Minutes – March 3, 2012

All students and mentors present.

Minutes:

 

Admin:

• Many had busy weeks, and didn’t accomplish much.
• Static media change has landed, if things break on update see ChipX86.
  • if you use MEDIA_URL at all, you need to switch to STATIC_URL or {% static “path” %} in templates.

Round Robin:

• ammok has no issues/blockers.
  • He hasn’t had a chance to consider the full-file review project yet.
• Curtis has no issues/blockers.
• happyface ran his ideas for the capabilities in rbtools by ChipX86.
  • Everything sounds good, ChipX86 wants to see the API he comes up with to make sure it’s future-proof.
• purple_cow arrived to meeting.
• jimrrchen hasn’t made much progress with rendering, wants more help from ChipX86.
  • Where code should be written was discussed.
  • jimrrchen will create a new template tag to render the diff.
  • jimrrchen will look at template tag examples in reviews/templatetags/reviewtags.py.
• smacleod needs reviews on extension modifications (specifically r2907).
  • ChipX86 completed a review during meeting.
• m_conley will be reviewing this week.
  • He insisted this be placed in the minutes.
• weilul wanted to discuss purple_cow’s comment on review request r2891.
  • There is an issue when two drafts are made concurrently.
  • To avoid dealing with conflict resolution, the first draft published “wins”.
  • This will be ignored for now, and dealt with separately since the issue already exists.
• H20 wanted discussion on options for his project (Issue 829)
  • Filtering by start character was suggested. There might be shortcomings with large user databases.
  • H20 will prototype and provide feedback / screenshots.
  • Django’s admin stuff might have some clever things H20 could copy.
• medanat’s r2881 was on hold for changes which have gone in now, ChipX86 is looking in to it.

Post Meeting:

• If you get ’Storage module “pipeline.storage” does not define a “PipelineCachedStorage” class.’ django_pipeline needs to be upgraded
  • run ‘python setup.py develop’ to fix this (or just upgrade django_pipeline).

Meeting Minutes: Feb 25, 2012

All members were present to the meeting

Minutes

Administrative

• Midterm reviews were sent the past Wednesday (ie we’re half-way through the “course”)
• Upgrading to Django 1.4 beta

1. {{MEDIA_URL}} is now {% static}
2. {{EXTENSION_MEDIA_URL}} is now {{EXTENSION_STATIC_URL}}
3. adds elif
4. Look out for random breakage
5. To install $ easy_install http://www.djangoproject.com/download/1.4-beta-1/tarball/#egg=Django-1.4b1
6. To update $ ./reviewboard/manage.py evolve –execute
7. feel free to read release notes https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.4/

Meeting

• Wilson’s new project will be to work on issue 829
• Willer is looking to pick up the “Weekly email update” project and is near completion of his latest review (post 2891). Also has some problems with the Scheduler. He will look into crontabs.
• Steven was a little blocked on his extensions; admin sites and default settings. To avoid ReviewBot being SpamBot, security measures were discussed.
• Jim will doing some catch up with his project.  He also has a blog post due Monday.
• Dave will be doing some research on diff file formats supported by git, svn, hg, and possibly cvs
• Curtis is looking to dynamically populate template files, and has been recommended to use templatetag.
• Anthony is looking for a new project, and will look into selecting between different styles to view screenshots in full review and diff review.

Side notes

• Django does NOT have tools for writing cronjobs
• How to test on local machine might be good documentation (or blog post) to make
• Kudos to Steven: documentation to commands to install extensions http://packages.python.org/an_example_pypi_project/setuptools.html#using-setup-py 

Meeting Minutes – Feb 11, 2012

Attendance: all mentors and students.

- Mike announced that mentors will determine part of our grades base on: 1) being pesent, 2) communication, 3) how well you take the code review criticism & 4) your projects. Nothing have we heard from the universities about the evaluation.

- Yazan was suggested to make the required field flag a star with “(required)” at the end and set required=”required”. On the summary table, Yazan would make a filter instead of collapsing (a little dropdown or toggles above it for showing opened issues or all; default to opened issues).

- Wilson has recovered and is doing well with his current review request. He will pick up another project soon.

- Steven learned from Mike and Christian that the WebHooks being blocked automatically is fine for now and that the POST request it sends should use JSON. Steven proposed to make some tools that can retrieve from the code base. Christian had three alternatives: pointing to the review board database, having an own clone of database or making some channel. They would talk about another issue, djblets extensions admin, afterwards.

- Jim learned some routines to involve djblets 0.6.x and see remote branches from Mike and David. He would need his master updated in this case.

- Dave had an OSError in his VM when he had to restart the dev server after file changes. Mike suggested him to try a fresh clone, and they would resolve the error later.

- Curtis wanted to look at similar some code on template hooks. Mike would show him how to use the review-summary-header-post hook after the meeting.

- Anthony had email issues. he would start looking at some unit tests (e.g. notifications/tests.py) Christian and Mike mentioned.

- Wei asked how to manually test his project. Mike suggested to set up a repository for the local reviewboard install, connect it to the actual Review Board Github repository, generate diffs against the current Review Board source, and post them to the local instance.

REMINDER —- Feb 28: status reports, Wilson; minutes, David.

Minutes for February 5, 2012

Our status updates are as follows:

• Anthony is waiting for a ship-it on his last review and is looking for a new project next week.
• Steve is looking for inputs in his project on which tool to use for the web request handling code. Candidates are Twisted, Node.js and Tornado. As recommended by Christian, Steve is going to try out Tornado. His code is going to be here.
• Jim is waiting for a ship-it in his last review. He found another bug that’s related to the component he is currently working on and he will open a bug for it.
• Yazan is doing fine and has plenty of work for the week. He also upload the photos for the code sprint here. Later, Yazan asks Christian for his input in this issue. Christian feel that it is not the top priority right now.
• Dave is going to take over Christian’s change for attachment review(binary diff). Dave also had a question about diff data for moved files and Christian answers it. The thing that was mentioned is moved files are hard to track with only diffs.
• Curtis is waiting for a ship-it for his review and needs feedback on interface designs for reviewboard-social link
• Wilson has a question regarding diff being unavailable but it seems to be nothing major. He also has another quick question later regarding cleaning up ”evolution” history and Christian answers it.
• Wei has a question regarding the “evolution” folder when he is exploring the code and Mike answers it. So “evolution” files are Python scripts that update database schema in Django. Wei also has a simple question regarding WebAPI and Christian answers it.
• Mike will be added to the mod list for reviewboard-dev

The next meeting is on February 11th, 2012. David will be collecting status reports and Wei will be taking meeting minutes.

February 11th – status reports: David, minutes: Wei Lu