[webkit-dev] to reitveld or not to reitveld

[Ojan Vafai]

On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 7:51 AM, Mark Rowe <mrowe at apple.com> wrote:

> On 2009-06-06, at 15:02, Peter Kasting wrote:
>
> On Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 1:48 AM, Mark Rowe <mrowe at apple.com> wrote:
>
>> Of the issues that Ojan mentioned in his original email, I see three that
>> would need to be addressed before we could consider adopting Rietveld:
>>
>  - Currently tied to AppEngine.
>>
>
> I don't understand why this is problematic in the least, any more than
> saying "Bugzilla is currently tied to being run by Bugzilla".  Why does it
> matter what the backing implementation of Rietveld is?
>
> Primarily due to the two points that you trimmed from my email:
>
> Two other major issues jump out at me:
> - Authentication. This is related to the AppEngine tie-in.
> - Authorization.  Patch reviews need to reflect the access controls on the
> bugs that they are associated with.
>
> There are also concerns about access to the data store of the application,
> backup procedures, etc.  Our existing servers are well understood in this
> regard.   We've also found in the past that having services spread across
> different systems causes confusion when something goes wrong, for whatever
> reason, as it's not clear who to contact to address the problem.
>

As I see it, these are the only non-trivial issues with using
rietveld. Things like not working with git are trivial fixes (e.g. git adds
"a/" and "b/" to the paths in the diff that need to be ignored). Also, I
really don't believe the intimidating UI is a problem in practice. Newcomers
get used to it very quickly.

I don't know enough about the rietveld code or appengine to say how
difficult it would be to address the authentication/authorization issues.
These would be the reason's to consider something like review-board instead.
My guess is that the access control bit is doable, but I think you'd
ultimately still need to sign in to AppEngine using a Google account.

For what it's worth, we've had next to zero maintenance effort go into
keeping rietveld running on appengine. As far as I know, it's been pretty
much stable and problem free. But I don't actually maintain it, so I can't
say that for sure. :)

Review-board would be considerably less effort than integrating something
directly into bugzilla. But rietveld would be less effort than review-board
if we can get the above issues addressed since there are a number of people
who already know the codebase willing to help out here.

It seems worth taking a look at how much work it would be to get
review-board setup and integrated with bugzilla.

Ojan
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/attachments/20090607/e4d827ca/attachment.html>