Posted by patrickd on November 29, 2011 at 1:28am
As klausis pareview script is very helpful to detect typicall project application problems I tried to set up an online service to make it easier for applicants to use without setting up a testing environment.
It was a all-in-one-day project, written quick and dirty - but It's working and maybe it'll also be useful ;-)
It can be found here: http://ventral.org/pareview
Comments
Very good idea. AFAIK such a
Very good idea. AFAIK such a thing (or something similar) is anyhow planned for the new process. However this will be realized, we will have to find some way to have this automated stuff literally automated. Soon. A manual review takes much time, hardly anyone except a few seem to be interested in helping with the queue at all and also, the understanding for why we insist on a certain standard level in code seems not to be too popular. (Many reviewers themselves speak of it as "nit-picking", so why should any applicant consider it the great and important thing it actually is IMO?)
Prove me wrong, but I suppose at least 50% regard coding standards as some nasty barrier which keeps them from doing cool things instead of adhering to them and having the bigger picture behind it. Sorry to say so but that's what I read between the lines in many objections on strict reviews. See also my proposal in the "revamped" thread. So unless we really rethink the entire process and question its current status quo and its benefits, we should quickly have the "nasty barrier" easier to pass by any kind of true automation.
Thus, thanks for the initiative, Patrick!
(Disclaimer: I do not consider strict standards as an unnecessary harassment. The opposite is actually true. I just quoted. But that is off topic in this thread.)
Agreed
Please see my discussion at:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/195303
Not having a single code testing tool means that people are hitting a barrier whereby they are happy to fix the code - but are finding incredibly difficult to quickly test their code.
While I do not need to repeat
While I do not need to repeat my appreciations for Patrick's initiative, we should not forget that anyone can install the two scripts.
So not just in order to save Patrick from updating them every day (remember: both pareview and drupalcs evolve constantly and get better at finding errors almost every day!) but also to aim for a redundant, distributed network of testing environments, I would really suggest an additional way.
As it is no real witchcraft to run these tools on any local machine once one has understood how to set them up, we should probably aim to making it as easy and as public as possible that this could and should be done.
Setting up a Linux box is, after all, possible for anyone, thanks to virtual machine environments for every popular platform. I doubt that anyone developing code really has not ever gotten in touch with a VM system, not to mention Linux/Unix. So, if there is any probable barrier at all, it may be setting up the environment. This is actually a bit tricky for those who are not familiar with CLI. (One could say: "So learn it better now than never", but that's not our issue here.)
I would conclude that all we would need for that is an installation profile which ships with:
- D7
- coder
- pareview.sh
- drupalcs
- Patricks's additions for a simple GUI as a module(?)
- One click background scripts to automatically update drupalcs (this is easy; we could include drupalcs in the libraries folder, run wget and tar to extract updates to there while the symlink to the code sniffer directory always stays the same)
- A one time install script for Pear and code sniffer.
To make it not too complicated, we should focus on Debian/Ubuntu/derivates as anyone with other *x systems should know what to do manually.
What do you think?
Uh, btw, Patrick: Your captcha has no nonscript fallback, could this be improved?
Updating from day to day
Updating from day to day don't hurt me, it updated with git pull by cron ;-)
I'm currently reworking the whole webservice script (you can find it here: http://drupal.org/sandbox/patrickd/1360798)
It's not just a GUI anylonger, it consists of two modules: pareview_client (Containing the GUI) and pareview_server (Uses Services 3.x, XMLRPC-Server and Session authentification).
The configuration of the client now has some improvements like defining fallback servers if one is unreachable or has full load.
I'm really trying to implement it distributed and scalable, so it's later useful for integrating this kind of service to drupal.org's infrastructure. And don't get me wrong, I'm really not trying to make http://ventral.org/pareview the official standart, also for me it is just a temporary tool on my website anyone can use (or even clone) until there are new and better ways to handle automated reviews.
I also talked about a VM-Image with some people and this is definitely a good idea but most say thay would rather prefer an online service.
But I think this as a good idea, if any help is needed on this (like implementing the GUI ;-D) I'd love to help!
Thanks, for the information, I'll try to change that.
(I'm currently on-the-road sorry if this text is hard to understand^^)
Oh, cron-updating - that's
Oh, cron-updating - that's really good. Perhaps you add a block "script status: pareview, Vx.y, 12/9/11; drupalcs, V1.2, 4/1/12" somewhere. Great!
Anyhow I would still like to see your entire installation as a profile everyone can install locally (once it's "ready"). Redundancy can't be overestimated ;)
VM image, as we discussed already, is too proprietary IMO. But a complete Drupal profile combined with a Debian compatible script should really do. (Side effect: Non-*X users get the chance to find out how easy Linux is set up even within Windoze. I could even provide a step-by-step guide for MS virtual PC. It works!! ;))
Your text is fine, but don't type and drive! We still need you here! ;)
@patrickd, thanks a lot for
@patrickd, thanks a lot for your work on this very helpful service!