[ovs-discuss] [OVN] Questions on the processes and code from a prospective contributor

[Gabriele Cerami]

Hi,

I'm trying to study the code to contribute to the project.
I've popped up yesteday on the meeting to say hi with the nick "panda"

As I said, I'm in parallel preparing a patch to the documentation with a
single file with all the steps I'm taking to ramp up, starting from low
knowledge.

I'm still trying to have a better understanding before completing some
of the steps, especially basic flows in the code.
I'll post the patch after posting these questions.

Please note that none of the questions is rhetorical.

1) Code review is done on email. I suppose that may there be a bot that
interprets the tags added to commit messages and automates some tasks,
and maybe being independent from any organization is the main drive for
this, but have you discussed a switch to github PR or any other web-based
method like gerrit ? Assuming you have, can you point me to the thread
in the archive ?

2) I'd like to understand better what git branching model are you using,
like e.g. long lived feature branches with occasional rebases and a
merge at the end ? Or maybe you prefer amended single patches ?

3) I've noticed that ovn-northd.c is a single file with 12000 lines. Is
this caused by precise implementation choice, maintainability or
performance reasons ? Was ever proposed to modularize it ? Again, is
there a thread to look at ?

4) I think I understand in tests the "unit" size seems to be set to a
command, so every test traverses all the functions in the execution path
that implement that command. The effect of this is that negative tests
also traverse all the functions before reaching an error. Have you ever
discussed using a unit test framework to shrink the unit to the size of
a function ?
I ran some make checks and the feedback time for the component tests seem
comfortable. End to end obviously less. So I'm not sure it would provide
benefit, but "less than a full execution path" is the size that is
usually preferred for a "unit"

Thanks for any reply