Working on the Extensions framework...

[Mike Conley]

Reviewboard Developers:

Hello all - I hope this is the right mailing list for this. Let me
introduce myself.

I'm a graduate student at the University of Toronto, and my research
interests lie in the code review domain.

I've also been using Reviewboard on an open-source Rails project
(http://www.markusproject.org) for about half a year. The team loves
your work - great job, all!

I'm interested in helping you develop your extension framework. In
particular, I'd like to give Reviewboard the ability to record certain
statistics (inspection rate, defect density, etc).

I believe I've found the branch of Reviewboard that has the extension
framework development on it (extensions branch in http://github.com/davidt/reviewboard),
and the Djblets to go along with it (extensions branch in
http://github.com/chipx86/djblets/). So, I've gotten that set up, and
I've been toying around with it, and I'd like to know if there's
anything I can do to help move this forward.

I know you're all busy with 1.5 coming out in the next few days, but
is there something in particular I can focus on in these branches to
help this framework move forward?

Thanks,

-Mike
PS: Shameless plug - if you're interested in checking out my research
proposals / meanderings, see: http://mikeconley.ca/blog/category/technology/computer-science/code-reviews/

[Christian Hammond]

Hi Mike,

Glad to see you're interested in the extensions framework. I saw your blog post and am glad you're working at it.

So a few things:

1) Yes, it's a bit old and outdated right now. We've been focusing on the 1.5 release, and extensions are on hold until that's out.

2) We have a schedule we're sticking to for extensions. It's going to go in the 2.0 release. Between now and then, we're going to have the 1.6 release which will be a much smaller release than 1.5. My hope is that I'll get a lot done on extensions during this as well, though it still won't be in until 2.0.

3) I'm not sure whether david's repo is more up-to-date than mine, but most of the development thus far, to my knowledge, has been on my own extensions branch in my repo. I'll try to get it more up-to-date soon, as well as djblets. Once we have more set in stone, we'll start pushing this to the main reviewboard repo.

One of the big things we need to do, really, is document our codebase better and decide which functions are public (and therefore need to work consistently across versions) and which are private. That's going to be a lot of work. As you noted, a lot of the extension functionality is actually there, it's just not ready for prime-time yet.

I think extensions are going to be awesome when they're ready, but we have other features we need to deliver sooner. So, just a matter of time.

Hopefully as we develop 1.6, we can keep the 2.0 branch (which will have extensions) up-to-date more so that people can be on the bleeding edge and help develop and test that release.

Christian

--
Christian Hammond - chi...@chipx86.com
Review Board - http://www.reviewboard.org
VMware, Inc. - http://www.vmware.com

[David Trowbridge]

My fork on github has the extensions branch merged as of 2/15/10,
which is a good 6 months ahead of Christian's.

I haven't been doing as frequent merges of the djblets extensions
changes, though, so those are probably a little older.

-David

[Christian Hammond]

Oh, didn't realize.

Going to spend some time this weekend getting my tree back in sync.

Christian

--
Christian Hammond - chi...@chipx86.com
Review Board - http://www.reviewboard.org
VMware, Inc. - http://www.vmware.com