pull request person

[Alex Harvey]

Hi all,

I recall reading that Jeff McCune would take care of pull requests until the end of November. 

Thanks again Jeff for all his hard work and patience explaining the development processes to newcomers.  I assume he's busy doing other stuff now - so is someone else assigned to look after pull requests for the month of December?  I have a few in the queue now and am hoping that I can keep the momentum going.

These are -
https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/17894  pull request https://github.com/puppetlabs/facter/pull/368
https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/17808  pull request https://github.com/puppetlabs/facter/pull/369

Kind regards,
Alex Harvey

[Jeff McCune]

On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 5:49 AM, Alex Harvey <alexh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I recall reading that Jeff McCune would take care of pull requests until the
> end of November.

Yep, this was originally intended as a minimum period of time, not a
maximum. I should have made that more clear to everyone. =)

> Thanks again Jeff for all his hard work and patience explaining the
> development processes to newcomers. I assume he's busy doing other stuff
> now - so is someone else assigned to look after pull requests for the month
> of December? I have a few in the queue now and am hoping that I can keep
> the momentum going.

I'm glad to hear there's momentum, I actually have a task item to
follow up with you as soon as possible about the processor facts. It
seems like you narrowed in on a solution which is great!

I'm really happy to say that I'll be continuing to focus exclusively
on community contributions for the foreseeable future. We decided to
keep at least one person in this potion full time in an effort to keep
the momentum going, as you say. In the future I'm hopeful we'll be
able to open up commit access to more people outside of Puppet Labs
and continue our efforts to make the contributing process smoother and
easier.

I'm still struggling to get on top of the ~80 open pull requests
across Puppet, Facter, hiera, stdlib, and others, but I think (hope!)
a lot of contributions have gotten attention in November that
otherwise might not have. I'm also really hopeful that those
contributors who are getting my attention "pay it forward" if they're
willing and able by helping other contributors. If anyone pings me
about how to help "pay it forward" I'll drop everything I'm doing
because we definitely can't do this without the community continuing
to help itself.

Throughout most of November I operated almost entirely in a "squeaky
wheel gets the grease" policy. I did this because other approaches
like first in, first out would probably mean that all pull requests
had to live a long life before getting any attention. I briefly tried
last in, first out, but this caused me to context switch at an
incredibly difficult to maintain pace.

You may have wondered where I've been the past week or so. The
Thanksgiving holiday took some time and we recently just moved into
our new office in Portland. We've also been working on some tooling
that we hope will help us work more efficiently and provide
transparency. To this end, we've separated out all of our community
contribution cards in our Trello system from the work the rest of the
platform team is working on. We did this primarily because they're
two very different types of work which is also why I'm focusing on
community contributions in the first place. It got a little hard to
keep track of with both types of work on one board. Now that they're
separated, we think it makes sense to simply make our development
community trello board public to the world.

It's a bit of a mess right now becuase I'm basically the only one
moving cards around on this board, but please feel free to have a
look. In an ideal world, this board should give you an idea of what
we're working on regarding community contributions to Puppet, Facter,
heira, and stdlib at any point in time.

https://trello.com/board/puppet-dev-community/50bd46a84c27cb74100035f5

The way I work with this board is as follows (and is pretty informal
and ad-hoc):

* Cards are automatically added in the leftmost column as pull
requests are opened. This is currently on a polling loop, but I plan
to make it event driven and hopefully near-realtime.

* If someone pings me, or I get a sense that an issue is affecting a
lot of people on puppet-users or what have you, then I try and put
that card in Accepted. I think of Accepted as "Stuff that I should do
next, but don't necessarily have to."

* The thing I'm currently working on should always be in "Doing."
Sometimes this isn't the case and I always appreciate people saying,
"Hey, what you're actually working on isn't what you said you're
working on." I also keep a monster checklist in "Doing" that I use as
a way to track stuff I've touched. I'm not sure how well this has
been working, the monster checklists were a bit of an experiment.

* select(contributor) are for things that I've engaged in, but am
waiting on someone else for. I try and put timers that "throw timeout
exceptions" so to speak so cards don't build up indefinitely here.

* Going through CI is for stuff that I've merged but hasn't yet "gone
green" across our entire test matrix. Our acceptance tests run
nightly so cards usually stay here overnight.

* The rightmost lane is for cards that have made it all the way
through our CI system, the redmine ticket is up to date, the GitHub
pull request is up to date and the contribution is mostly out of our
hands at this point. It's definitely not "done" from an end user
perspective though because it hasn't yet gone through a release. I'll
try and clear this out every iteration and send the summary of stuff
we got done based on this list.

Hopefully this helps provide transparency into what we're working on
from a community contribution perspective. I'm totally open to
suggestions about how to make the information on this board more
valuable to everyone.

> These are -
> https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/17894 pull request
> https://github.com/puppetlabs/facter/pull/368
> https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/17808 pull request
> https://github.com/puppetlabs/facter/pull/369

Thanks for pinging me on these. I'll try and get them updated with
next actions as soon as possible. I'm currently working on some
Amazon EC2 related Facter (#7559 and #17925) issues but I hope to have
them all wrapped up by the end of this week.

Finally, I really look forward to keeping up the momentum we've built
up together and hopefully getting our velocity as a community up as
well.

Cheers,
-Jeff

[Alex Harvey]

Hi Jeff,

This all sounds great and the public Trello board looks great.  I mainly wanted to know who the right person to ping was so take your time.

Best regards,
Alex