[jbosstools-dev] Any way to make FreeMarker IDE fixes available with less delay?

[Daniel Dekany]

Is it possible to become faster with PR merging on the expense of
thoroughness in the case of FreeMarker IDE, if I'm the one who sent
the PR (or if I have tested a PR)? I understand that there's very
little time for reviewing this plugin, that's why I'm trying to take
more responsibility on myself. Some recent PR-s are less trivial (more
time to thoroughly review) than the earlier merged ones, plus some
similar PR-s weren't even done yet because they build on top of the
ones not merged yet. So I'm a bit worried about how all these will get
in on time. Also, take into account that this plugin is quite broken
and was neglected for so long, so certainly I will only make it better
overall even if I introduce some regressions accidentally.

For convenience, here are some of the pending PR-s:
https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBIDE-20386
https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBIDE-22636
https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBIDE-22656
https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBIDE-22659


Wednesday, April 13, 2016, 2:33:25 AM, Daniel Dekany wrote:

> Basically, I was thinking about pulling more responsibility on myself.
> That's surely a risk as I'm totally new to Eclipse plugin development,
> and I don't yet know your policies either. So it's very useful if some
> old timer JBoss Tool developers review the PR-s, but often I would
> rather take the risk so that I can quickly fix/update things. That's
> why on the FreeMarker list I asked if we could/should roll our own
> build and update site, which can thus publish things regardless of the
> pace PR-s can be processed (note that that thread has started before
> you guys started reviewing the PR-s). But of course, for me the best
> is if the whole process can stay here. So, who's possibly eligible for
> "reviewing and testing PR's", or how would that work?
>
>
> Monday, April 11, 2016, 11:26:11 AM, Max Rydahl Andersen wrote:
>
>> On 8 Apr 2016, at 8:34, Daniel Dekany wrote:
>>
>>> Thank you very much! To be perfectly clear, I didn't come here to
>>> complain and force JBoss employees to do this. I'm asking if there's a
>>> way to change the overall process somehow. Perhaps not, but, who
>>> knows...
>>
>> There is - we have an updatesite for freemarker site that builds every
>> night, so you can releases/fixes from it more or less immediately.
>>
>> To get more content in, we need more content in PR's to the repos and if
>> someone
>> wants to step up to review and test PR's let us know.
>>
>> As you notice if we come aware of something going stale we do react - to
>> avoid it going
>> stale repeatedly we need someone to have time and skills to push 
>> content.
>>
>> If it was something else you had in mind let me know. In any case, we 
>> are pretty open
>> on what happens with freemarker tooling as long as it keeps (within 
>> reason) being compatible with
>> multiple freemarker versions so it can be used in real projects that end
>> up having wide
>> range of freemarker content.
>>
>> /max
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Friday, April 8, 2016, 12:00:19 AM, Alexey Kazakov wrote:
>>>
>>>> Sorry for such long delays.
>>>> I pushed the 4-month old PR to the master. We are currently very busy
>>>> preparing JBoss Tools 4.3.1 release (should happen in two weeks) but
>>>> then we will find some time to review the other two PRs.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for your contributions!
>>>>
>>>> On 04/07/2016 05:39 PM, Daniel Dekany wrote:
>>>>> I'm a contributor at the FreeMarker project, and would like to help
>>>>> maintaining JBoss Tools / FreeMarker IDE
>>>>> (org.jboss.ide.eclipse.freemarker). The problem I'm facing is that
>>>>> pull requests get merged with too big delay. For example, I have a 
>>>>> few
>>>>> simple pull requests waiting for 4 months now, because of the 
>>>>> limited
>>>>> resources available for reviewing them (as I was told). I wonder if 
>>>>> I
>>>>> can help improving this situation somehow.
>>>>>
>>>>> If the above can be addressed, then I guess I could specify the
>>>>> nightly build update site URL to the users, so that they aren't
>>>>> affected by the release cycle of JBoss Tools. After all, FreeMarker
>>>>> IDE is technically quite independent of it.

-- 
Thanks,
 Daniel Dekany