Custom Query (2152 matches)

Reported by sebbacon, 3 years ago.

Proposer: Seb Bacon
Seconder: Rufus Pollock

Abstract

When adding major new features to CKAN, a longer, more formal discussion will improve software design quality and documentation, better engage the wider community, and ensure the core team are up to date with latest developments.

I propose a formal process (CREP -- CKAN Revision and Enhancement Proposal) for making this happen.

The Problem

The current workflow for introducing major new features into CKAN is very informal, typically based around one person's great idea, which they've discussed with one or two other people in the team. The originator of the idea is typically the only person with access to all the input they've had through such discussions. Often, the only location of this information is in that person's head.

However, there is a lot of experience embodied in the CKAN community which should be drawn on before making large design decisions. This will lead to better software. Additionally, building consensus in the community around a proposal before implementation ensures positive community engagement and buy-in to new features, making them more likely to be a success.

We aren't great at documenting new features. Documentation after coding is complete is an unrewarding experience for most programmers. Requiring skeleton documentation before code is written is a good discipline that can form the basis of better documentation in the future (e.g. by a writer rather than a programmer).

Specification

Minor features don't require a CREP, and can just be entered in the issue tracking system as a bug or feature. As a rule of thumb, a feature is major if it will take more than a day to implement, or is likely to involve matters of opinion in its design.

A developer may decide that a CREP is too formal and long-winded. The decision to write a CREP is at at their discretion; however, new features MUST always be proposed via email, even if this is just a couple of sentences.

If a feature requires a CREP, the proposer should find a seconder for their idea. This sanity check step happens before a CREP is written to ensure at least the possibility of consensus on the CREP.

Next the proposer should write a CREP, starting by copying and pasting the ​template on the wiki into a new Trac ticket. This will be with a status of "new" and Type of "CREP". The proposer should notify the ​ckan-dev mailing list, and possibly the ​ckan-discuss list for less technical CREPs.

The draft can be discussed via email, verbally, or via the trac ticket. In any case, it is the proposer's responsibility to keep the CREP updated to reflect the current consensus.

Once consensus has been reached, the ticket should be marked with the "accepted" status and assigned to a CKAN release milestone.

When an accepted CREP has been implemented, it should be resolved as "fixed".

If no consensus can be reached on a draft CREP, or for some reason an accepted CREP doesn't get completed, it should be marked as or "wontfix".

If a completed CREP becomes obsolete, it should be marked as "invalid", with a note pointing to the obsoleting ticket(s)

Why do it this way

Given the distributed nature of the core team plus other volunteers, some kind of written procedure is necessary to ensure a fully documented and discussed proposal.

The idea of "Enhancement Proposals" which can be semi-formally proposed and discussed prior to implementation is common in the Open Source world (​PEPs, ​DEPs, ​PLIPs, to name three).

Existing historic proposals exist, called CEPs. The proposed system is called CREP (CKAN revision or enhancement proposal) to disambiguate it from the legacy proposals, and from the delicious fungus Boletus Edulis.

Giving a formal structure to the proposal is useful as it gives the community a means to identify a CREP that's not had sufficient thought or discussion. An informal email thread can easily be lost and important questions (such as backwards compatibility) overlooked. The use of the proposed template empowers any community member to ask the proposer to expand on rationale, deliverables, etc.

The structure chosen is somewhere between Debian's and Plone's. It aims to give a structure to the debate, a clear start at documentation, and also prompt some thinking about implementation and timescales.

All this policy about structure should not be construed as mandatory. In particular, the later fields in the CREP template regarding Implementation Plan may be omitted if the author doesn't find them helpful.

Some projects (e.g. Debian) keep their enhancement proposals in a versioning repository; others (e.g. Plone) keep them in an issue tracking system. Trac is proposed for CKAN because we already use it for small feature proposals and for team planning. It seems unlikely that change tracking on an individual CREP will be useful; a CREP that changes sufficiently from its original form should probably be marked "obselete" and a new CREP started. Using an issue tracking system also means we can easily track CREPs by state.

Backwards Compatibility

Some [​https://bitbucket.org/okfn/ceps/src/76b274888bcf/cep/ legacy enhancement proposals], called CEPs, have previously been started.

They are currently all marked as "active". Any which require discussion should be altered by the proposer to match the new CREP specification and submitted to trac. The original CEP should be updated with a banner at the top pointing a reader to the new CREP.

Any that are now obselete should be clearly marked as such in a banner at the top, pointing a reader to the trac for new CREPs.

Implementation plan

Deliverables

• This CREP, agreed
• Support for proposed statuses in Trac
• Canned reports for listing CREPs in Trac

Risks and mitigations

• That this CREP is agreed, but rarely acted on. This risk can be mitigated by nominating a CREP champion in the community or core team, whose job it is to say "where's the CREP for that?" and generally own the quality of CREPS

Participants

Seb Bacon: as current Documentation Czar (May 2011), responsible for ensuring CREPs are up to date.

Progress

This document is the entire proposal.

Reported by seanh, 3 years ago.

At the paster db init command when installing ckan from source I get the error "Import Error: cannot import name UnicodeMultiDict?" (happens with both ckan 1.4.2 and today's latest bleeding edge code, on Ubuntu 10.04.3).

UnicodeMultiDict? has been removed in a recent version of python-webob, and the pip install ... lucid_missing.txt causes a too-new version of python-webob to be installed into ckan's virtualenv (the new webob gets installed as a dependency of formalchemy).

I manually did pip uninstall webob and then ran paster db init again and it worked.

Reported by seanh, 3 years ago.

Create a new dataset, don't add any resources to the dataset yet, view the dataset in ckan, if you have firebug enabled you'll see the error "resource is undefined" at line 699 of application.js.