[Koha-devel] Koha PEOPLE Efficiency [WAS: RFC: Koha : Merge biblio & biblioitems tables]

[Andrew Moore]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 5:40 PM, Rick Welykochy <rick at praxis.com.au> wrote:
> <RANT>
>
> I am *VERY* concerned about people performance. To wit:

Hi Rick - I'm thankful for your rant. Not only do I agree that we're
suffering from some technical debt that makes contributions more
difficult, time consuming, and laborious, but I see notes like yours
as more of a motivational encouragement than a repetition of old
arguments. I try to make my new code better than what came before it,
and to make some of the surrounding code a little better, too. I hope
you do the same and to help me and others improve.

Here are some things that have come along recently that I view as
helping in this front. I urge you to support them and to help improve
the Koha code in other ways.

* We have a perltidy rc file at
<http://git.koha.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=Koha;a=blob;f=xt/perltidyrc;hb=HEAD>
that can help us format our code consistently. Don't forget to run it
on your newly contributed files and on the portions of files that you
edit.

* We have a growing test suite which is run nightly by a cronjob. The
reports are sent to a smolder server for easy viewing
<http://git.koha.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=Koha;a=blob;f=xt/perltidyrc;hb=HEAD>.
We unfortunately often break our own test suite and don't get it fixed
very soon, so maintaining that may help.

* We have some RFCs for development style improvements or projects to
improve how we write code. For instance, it's pretty commonly agreed
that we should be turning on 'warnings' in all of the perl code:
<http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:development:rfcs3.2:rfc32_turn_on_warnings>.
And the code that already runs under warnings often emits useless
warnings. A project like that is pretty easy to contribute to and
helps pay down some of our technical debt. Or, if you're more
ambitious, how about working to find a minimal set of Perl::Critic
policies that we can agree on and making sure our code is valid by
those guidelines?

* I drew up some ideas on things to do to help review each others'
code: <http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:development:code_review_ideas>.
 Do you have any additional tips there, or suggestions on how to make
a process for reviewing each other's code more efficient or valuable?

Thanks for pointing out this weakness of the Koha project. I have lots
of ideas on how we can improve, too. I'm hopeful that after we pluck
some of the lower hanging fruit that has already been described that
we can investigate more ways. I think that knowing that most of us are
constantly fighting for things to get better helps us to work together
towards these improvements. Please don't let your rant stall out
before it becomes action!

-Andy