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In OpenStack, we are lucky to have more contributors every day. This translates in a huge number of patches, especially for big project like Neutron, that need to be reviewed. As I write, 14 patches have been updated in the last hour and only in the Neutron core. It’s impossible to keep track of everything and with this overwhelming amount of code it’s hard to find what’s more important to review. Reviewers need to spend valuable time skimming the patches and, of course, something might be overlooked.
A mail thread was started back in early Mitaka when the idea for an automated tool to filter reviews came up. In Neutron, our requirements were very clear: we wanted to be able to get patches that implement approved blueprints and feature requests or that fix critical or high bugs. We all use Gerrit to review code so a Gerrit dashboard seemed the best choice to display the filtered patches. Unfortunately, we store all the information regarding blueprints and bugs in Launchpad and Gerrit has no access to that data. To solve this issue, we created a script to query Launchpad and then use those data to generate the Gerrit dashboard. At first this script was hosted in the Neutron repository and everyone had to run it manually locally to produce the link for the Gerrit dashboard.
Again, we thought we could do better. We wanted a public URL that everyone could access. A static URL was not enough: if a new bug is discovered and targeted as high the URL for the dashboard needs to be updated to include that bug in the filters. We needed a way to generate the URL dynamically and periodically. We started a conversation with the Infra team and after few trials we finally found a solution that pleased everybody.
In the end, we added in ReviewDay a link to the Gerrit dashboard for Neutron, that is constantly updated thanks to a periodic job run by Jenkins. Now instead of going through hundreds of patches, Neutron reviewers can simply click a link and get the most important patches in one page — see below for a preview or click on the link above to access the page.
Get involved!
Use Ask OpenStack for general questions
For roadmap or development issues, subscribe to the OpenStack development mailing list, and use the tag [neturon]
To get code, ask questions, view blueprints, etc, see: Neutron Launchpad Page
Neutron’s regular IRC meetings start one hour after the main openstack meeting, on the same #openstack-meeting channel: http://wiki.openstack.org/Network/Meetings
Sblendido is a software engineer at SUSE. A core reviewer for Neutron, she’s been involved in software-defined networking since 2010. She’s also a mentor for the OpenStack Outreach Program for Women.
Superuser is always on the lookout for community content. Please get in touch: [email protected]
Cover Photo // CC BY NC
- A better way to track reviews for Neutron - June 8, 2016
