On 2022-04-07 at 10:16 +01, "Hunt, James O" <james.o.hunt@intel.com> wrote...
Hi David,
Thanks for raising! Comments inline below, but I wonder if we should move this to a GitHub issue for wider discussion?
I made the same comment to David. However, without speaking for David, some developers coming from a kernel / qemu / "old" background are more at ease with mail-based discussion, notably because it makes it easier to quote extensively. Not sure how to reconcile the two points of view ;-) I will let David decide what to do.
Le 2022-04-07T15:13:57+1000, David Gibson a écrit :
Hi everyone,
I believe this idea was raised briefly at a recent AC meeting, but here's a more concrete proposal.
RFC: A streamlined process for cleanup patches ==============================================
Rationale ---------
Currently, commiting a change to Kata generally requires both a Github issue and a linked Github pull request. This works for bugs found "in the wild" and for feature/enhancement requests: it makes sense to discuss the change that needs to happen before moving on to how to implement it.
However, this process works poorly for "cleanup" patches. That includes internal refactoring without changing external behaviour, and also bugs found by inspection where it's clear that the code doesn't behave as it should, but working backwards to find user inputs which would trigger the bug can be quite difficult. It's certainly possible to write an issue for such a fix, but it often ends up just re-iterating the same information as in the PR; the issue templates also don't help with it since they assume the report is coming from observation of behaviour, rather than inspection of code.
I agree. In general, if the PR only repeats the information found in the issue, or if you fill an issue just to be able to submit a PR, this indicates that we are just creating process overhead.
In addition cleanup patches don't work well with the procedural checks which require each PR to have a patch labelled as fixing a Github issue. A well written cleanup PR will often consist of a number of small patches which each incrementally improve the code quality, but none of which could be said specifically to "fix" a clearly delineated problem. This means that someone writing a cleanup PR has to either arbitrarily place the "fixes #" tag on the last patch (which is misleading), or place it on all of them which could lead to prematurely closing the issue if an incomplete series is merged my mistake.
Indeed.
To reduce barriers to people addressing technical debt in Kata, I therefore propose that we introduce a shorter process for reviewing and merging cleanup patches.
+1.
+1 too
Guidelines ----------
We don't want to stop encouraging well written reports for externally observed bugs, or enhancement requests. So, we need some guidelines as to what constitutes a "cleanup" PR.
A PR which changes the code without changing any externally visible behaviour would certainly qualify.
Would that include a major refactoring of the code? I would be a bit more restrictive here, add some kind of size or simplicity criterion. Maybe what I do not understand is what you mean with "externally visible". Do you mean outside of the code being affected (i.e. unit test level), or external to the program (i.e. functional test).
I think limiting to *only* that would be too restrictive though: that would disallow PRs which technically change behaviour but only in an obscure / unsupported / unimportant case. Likewise it would prevent fixing of bugs found by inspection - we want to encourage people to fix bugs, not slow them down with bureaucracy.
Here are some possible guidelines that admittedly leave some fuzzy room in the middle:
Considered a cleanup patch: * Internal refactoring with no external behaviour change * Rewording comments or documentation for clarity * Updates to developer facing documentation to match other cleanup changes
NOT considered a cleanup patch: * Added functionality * Anything requiring user facing documentation to be updated to match code changes
+1.
What about removing a case where there is an agent panic and replace it with a proper error message? We don't document all detailed errors. I would consider the following as OK: - Improvements in error handling or error messages? - Change in some local algorithm for a more efficient one (e.g. a linear search with a binary search) What I am not sure about is more significant refactoring, like the rather big changes done recently in support of Darwin. I would argue that such large changes need issues ahead of time to explain what is being done. I can't come up with a really precise definition, though. Common sense applies. Maybe a simple rule would be that someone reviewing could state that a PR is too complicated and that an issue needs to be opened for it. Also, what about one-line fixes for obvious typos / minor errors? Not strictly a cleanup.
Process -------
There are several ways we could allow for a streamline cleanup process. Here are three options, which I'm soliciting opinions on:
Option 1 (no issue required)
* Cleanup PRs can be submitted with no accompanying Github issue * Such a PR must be tagged with a (new) 'cleanup' label
I like this option best, but a more flexible solution would be to require option 1 for cleanup work, and make option 3... optional, to provide further details if required ;)
However, I'd rather we mark the commit (see below) than the PR since that way the Git history stores the details rather than only having it stored in GitHub metadata. We could get the benefit of both though if we wrote a new GitHub Action to automatically add a `cleanup` label when it finds a cleanup commit.
Funny that I recall making almost the exact same comment to David when we discussed this ;-) The cleanup label is useful because that's how you search things on GitHub. But I believe that "cleanup:" (for pure cleanup) or "minor:" (for one-line fixes or similar) in the first line of the git commit.
* Scripts would be adjusted to to require a "fixes" tag on a cleanup labelled PR
s/to to/to not/ presumably.
Advantages: - Minimum of overhead for small fixes Disadvantages: - Process would need to be documented elsewhere, with no ability for Github to guide people through it
True, but with good docs, I don't see that as an issue. But to help contributors who forget to add the crucial "fixes #" comment [1] (new contributors and seasoned developers in a hurry), we could tweak the static check GitHub action to display an error along the lines of:
"no fixes issue found - is this a cleanup PR? See <fixes-docs-url> and <cleanup-docs-url> for further details"
+1
Option 2 (special issue template, minimal PR)
* A new issue template for Cleanup is added alongside enhancement request, bug fix etc. * PRs attached to a cleanup issue are allowed / expected to be minimal, simply linking the issue with no further description required (individual patches in the PR should still have good commit messages, of course)
Advantages: - Issue template can help guide people through the processz Disadvantages: - Still requires the extra step of creating both the issue and PR
And not a win at all for single-patch fixes (even worse for single-line fixes)
Option 3 (long-lived cleanup issues)
* Cleanups can be attached to a specially labelled issue which describes not a specific problem, but rather a general area where cleanup / improvement might be desirable * PRs linked to a "cleanup" issue aren't expected to "fix" it, just to make some amount of improvement * Merging multiple PRs against the same cleanup issue would be normal * Scripts would be adjusted not to require a "fixes" tag on such a PR, but maybe a "improves" tag. Processing such a PR would *not* close the issue
I like the idea of the "improves" tag, irrespective of your proposal. Or "Issue: #1234"... (shorter) For example, if there are multiple commits in a PR, those that make progress, but don't fix, could be "Issue: #1234"
Advantages: - Allows incremental improvements to be merged quickly, without requiring them to fully "fix" some delineated problem Disadvantages: - Unclear when the right time to (manually) close such an issue would be, because it's now "good enough"
Also makes it a bit harder to know when something is closed. - With a PR, we know that the PR closes something, even with multiple commits - With an ongoing issue, this is harder to see in the history.
Agreed that it's unclear when to close the issue. Some alternatives:
- Reference a wiki page URL. - Reference an issue in a new "cleanup" repo that is simply for tracking. - Reference a GitHub project URL.
These would all remove the possibility of the issue being closed inadvertently by a cleanup PR but still don't solve the problem of when to consider the work "done". This does make me wonder if we need a new GitHub team to oversee such cleanup work and decide when the chosen tracking device needs to be closed.
## Conventional commits
We've discussed the topic of conventional commits [2] previously [3], but now might be a good time to revive that conversation. Our patch format [1] isn't that dissimilar to the conventional commits format already. Plus, we should be able to remove checkcommits [4] from our CI process and rely entirely on the GHA commit checker [5]. Then all we'd need to do is get [5] to support a variant [6] of conventional commits **optionally**.
For cleanup PRs, rather than something like this:
``` build: Fix typo in Makefile
Correct a spelling mistake in the top-level Makefile.
Fixes: #1234.
Signed-off-by: $name <$email> ```
... we could (make [5]) allow:
``` cleanup: build: Fix typo in Makefile
Correct a spelling mistake in the top-level Makefile.
Signed-off-by: $name <$email> ```
... or optionally:
``` cleanup: build: Fix typo in Makefile
Correct a spelling mistake in the top-level Makefile.
Improves: $url
Signed-off-by: $name <$email> ```
In other words, just add a "cleanup:" conventional commits "type" before our subsystem prefix [1].
I agree, but I would distinguish: - cleanup: Change without functional impact (variable rename, comments, doc, spelling, ...) - minor: A minor fix - refactor: A functional change to improve the code
Cheers,
James
[1] - https://github.com/kata-containers/community/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#patch... [2] - https://www.conventionalcommits.org [3] - https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/issues/195 [4] - https://github.com/kata-containers/tests/issues/4596 [5] - https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/blob/main/.github/workflo... [6] - The Conventional commits term for our "subsystem" is "scope" which is put in brackets rather than being a colon prefix as Kata currently uses.
-- Cheers, Christophe de Dinechin (IRC c3d)