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Help Drupal Grow

24 Aug 2010

BoF to learn how to review code contributions on Thursday 26 August 2010 at 16:00 at DrupalCon Copenhagen.

At the Core Developers Summit on Sunday (22 August 2010), webchick gave a presentation about the CVS application process and what was wrong with it and what was valuable and needs to remain (there’s a video somewhere of it). One of the impetuses for this talk is the git migration that is happening for the drupal.org infrastructure, because it offers us an opportunity to rethink our code contribution application process (aka CVS application process).

The agreed upon process is not a complete upheavel of our current mechanism, but does help address a few issues. I am sure there will be some issues created, but the basics are the following:

  • Any user that agrees some basic things, like about licenses and best practices, can actually commit to the Drupal git repository.
  • Users cannot create releases of their projects without going through a code review process.

Basically what this helps resolve is that drupal.org will be able to offer a very basic place for anyone to store versioned code with very little barriers, instead of code being put on something like GitHub. This also will mean that code can have most of the drupal.org project features, like queues, and can be reviewed a lot more easily. But we still will need to review code to allow for users to create real releases. And unfortunately this is the biggest bottleneck of the process.

The CVS application queue is only growing. We (the Drupal community) need the help of experienced (but not necessarily expert) module developers and themers that have a good attitude to help new contributors to Drupal. This is a critical time for people who come into the community and it is important to have it be a positive experience (see my longer comment about this).

There are a number of things that can be done to help make this review process easier for both reviewers and applicants, such as more complete documentation and automatic coder reviews, but ultimately we can’t completely remove the human element of it, at least for a while. As suggest by webchick, I have set up a BoF for Thursday at 16:00 to help teach people how to be a reviewer; if you are in Copenhagen, please come by; if not, read this and go ahead and start reviewing!. It’s really fun.

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