Thread: Next commitfest app release is planned for March 18th

Next commitfest app release is planned for March 18th

From
Jelte Fennema-Nio
Date:
The next commitfest app release is planned for March 18th and will
contain the following changes:

1. Major change: The homepage is revamped completely! It now shows a
dashboard of open patches where you are author/reviewer/committer if
you are logged in. These patches are ordered & grouped in a hopefully
useful way. If you're not logged in it will show you the current
commitfest. See screenshot for an example. The old list of all
commitfests is moved to the /archive (which has a button on the
homepage). Peter Geoghegan suggested adding a "dashboard" of this
kind. Feedback on this is very welcome, but depending on the
complexity I don't know when I'll get to it. I'll be a bit more busy
the next few weeks and also have some holidays planned.
2. Show name of a committer in the "Committer" column (instead of only
the username).
3. Fix the "Review" form so that all checkboxes can actually be
clicked. Thanks to Maciek.
4. Allow sorting patches by "failing since", this can be done by
clicking the header. This does *not* work on the staging website,
because CFbot is not sending CI updates there currently.
5. Remove "latest activity" column. This did not contain useful information.
6. The "latest email" column now shows "time since" (e.g. 1 week ago)
instead of an exact timestamp. You can still see the exact timestamp
by hovering over the cell.
7. Searching patches by author/reviewer now isn't a dropdown with a
ton of options, but instead has become a dropdown with a search box.
This also greatly improves page load performance: By not putting all
users in the HTML as a dropdown option it's saving 600-700ms in my
testing on staging.
8. Bugfix: Correctly show CI timeout as failure.

One thing I'm wondering about 3 though: Do people actually think these
checkboxes are even useful in the first place? For people not
familiar, they add these lines to an email:
> make installcheck-world:  tested, passed
> Implements feature:       tested, passed
> Spec compliant:           not tested
> Documentation:            tested, passed

At least the first one seems not very useful, now that we have the
CFBot. Is the rest useful to anyone or do these buttons just result in
clutter.

As always, please test out the current staging website[1] to give some feedback.
HTTP auth user and password are both pgtest.

Also I wanted to highlight the work Jacob Brazeal is doing again. He
has been working on an AI-powered summarization and patch review
recommendation engine[2]. I definitely recommend people to take a look
at that and leave some feedback.

[1]: https://commitfest-test.postgresql.org/
[2]: https://patchwork-three.vercel.app/

Attachment

Re: Next commitfest app release is planned for March 18th

From
Peter Eisentraut
Date:
On 04.03.25 02:21, Jelte Fennema-Nio wrote:
> 1. Major change: The homepage is revamped completely! It now shows a
> dashboard of open patches where you are author/reviewer/committer if
> you are logged in. These patches are ordered & grouped in a hopefully
> useful way. If you're not logged in it will show you the current
> commitfest. See screenshot for an example. The old list of all
> commitfests is moved to the /archive (which has a button on the
> homepage). Peter Geoghegan suggested adding a "dashboard" of this
> kind. Feedback on this is very welcome, but depending on the
> complexity I don't know when I'll get to it. I'll be a bit more busy
> the next few weeks and also have some holidays planned.

I don't know if I like that.  I can see the point of getting to the 
action quicker, but this sort of obscures the hierarchy of the site and 
the data.  Before it was like, select a commitfest, select a filter, 
here are some patches.  Now it's like, here is some stuff.  Where did it 
come from, how does it relate to the other stuff, how do I get to an 
overview of all the stuff and the hierarchy of stuff.

How does one get back to the old homepage?  I figured it out, you click 
the "Archive" button.  Why is that a button?  Also, the row of buttons 
is now seemingly a mix of actions on the current commit fest mixed with 
site navigation.  See above, what is the hierarchy of information and 
the context of actions.  This is a bit confusing.




Re: Next commitfest app release is planned for March 18th

From
Jelte Fennema-Nio
Date:
On Tue, 4 Mar 2025 at 10:22, Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org> wrote:
> I don't know if I like that.  I can see the point of getting to the
> action quicker, but this sort of obscures the hierarchy of the site and
> the data.  Before it was like, select a commitfest, select a filter,
> here are some patches.  Now it's like, here is some stuff.  Where did it
> come from, how does it relate to the other stuff, how do I get to an
> overview of all the stuff and the hierarchy of stuff.

I'm curious if there was anything specific that you used the old
homepage for. Especially things you did often that are now harder to
do. The only things I used on the homepage were:
1. Going to the "In Progress" and "Open" commitfest (usually with one
of the links that filter for patches related to me).
2. Going to the most-recently "Closed" commitfest to move/close my
previously submitted patches.
3. Search for commitfest entries by Message-ID

I agree that the new homepage now hides the hierarchy of the site, but
I'd say that most people using it probably don't really have to know
about that hierarchy. At least not care so much that it should be on
the initial page. I definitely have never clicked on a link for a
commitfest that's older than a year.

> How does one get back to the old homepage?  I figured it out, you click
> the "Archive" button.  Why is that a button?  Also, the row of buttons
> is now seemingly a mix of actions on the current commit fest mixed with
> site navigation.

That's primarily to mirror the style of the commitfest page a bit.
i.e. Most of the buttons there are also links, i.e. "New patch" and
all the items under "Shortcuts"

> See above, what is the hierarchy of information and
> the context of actions.  This is a bit confusing.

I do agree that it would be nicer to separate them. I'll look into
improving/replacing the navigation bar. But do you think these buttons
are so confusing, that this new homepage should be blocked on that?



Re: Next commitfest app release is planned for March 18th

From
Álvaro Herrera
Date:
On 2025-Mar-04, Jelte Fennema-Nio wrote:

> 1. Major change: The homepage is revamped completely! It now shows a
> dashboard of open patches where you are author/reviewer/committer if
> you are logged in. These patches are ordered & grouped in a hopefully
> useful way. If you're not logged in it will show you the current
> commitfest. See screenshot for an example. The old list of all
> commitfests is moved to the /archive (which has a button on the
> homepage).

I think showing different pages on the same URL depending on whether
you're logged in or not is not great UX.  The idea of this dashboard
sounds very good to me, but it shouldn't replace the initial page (list
of commitfests).  Maybe put this in a URL such as 
  https://commitfest.postgresql.org/you
or
  https://commitfest.postgresql.org/me
or something easily reachable like that.

This also allows you to provide a standardized URL for one to look at
the activities of others, so if I visit
  https://commitfest.postgresql.org/you/petere
I can see Peter's stuff.

-- 
Álvaro Herrera               48°01'N 7°57'E  —  https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
Tom: There seems to be something broken here.
Teodor: I'm in sackcloth and ashes...  Fixed.
                               http://postgr.es/m/482D1632.8010507@sigaev.ru



Re: Next commitfest app release is planned for March 18th

From
Amit Kapila
Date:
On Tue, Mar 4, 2025 at 4:05 PM Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org> wrote:
>
> On 2025-Mar-04, Jelte Fennema-Nio wrote:
>
> > 1. Major change: The homepage is revamped completely! It now shows a
> > dashboard of open patches where you are author/reviewer/committer if
> > you are logged in. These patches are ordered & grouped in a hopefully
> > useful way. If you're not logged in it will show you the current
> > commitfest. See screenshot for an example. The old list of all
> > commitfests is moved to the /archive (which has a button on the
> > homepage).
>
> I think showing different pages on the same URL depending on whether
> you're logged in or not is not great UX.
>

+1. The default should be what we see today, and there should be some
way to see the patches in which a particular person is involved.

--
With Regards,
Amit Kapila.



Re: Next commitfest app release is planned for March 18th

From
Jelte Fennema-Nio
Date:
On Tue, 4 Mar 2025 at 13:36, Amit Kapila <amit.kapila16@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Mar 4, 2025 at 4:05 PM Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org> wrote:
> > I think showing different pages on the same URL depending on whether
> > you're logged in or not is not great UX.
> >
>
> +1. The default should be what we see today, and there should be some
> way to see the patches in which a particular person is involved.

I'm quite surprised that people seem to love the content of the
current homepage so much. Could someone explain why they want to see
this full list of commitfests as the first page you see? I feel like
I'm missing something here.

To be clear, I'm totally fine with moving the dashboard to a different
URL, definitely for now at least. But I personally would like to have
a homepage that shows me information that I come to the site to see,
not just a bunch of links to which a new link gets added each month.

Also having a homepage that shows completely different info for logged
in users and non-logged in users is pretty common. e.g. GitHub shows
you a similar dashboard when you're logged in, but shows a page with
generic information and a signup/signin link when you're not.



Re: Next commitfest app release is planned for March 18th

From
Robert Haas
Date:
On Tue, Mar 4, 2025 at 5:35 AM Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org> wrote:
> The idea of this dashboard
> sounds very good to me, but it shouldn't replace the initial page (list
> of commitfests).  Maybe put this in a URL such as
>   https://commitfest.postgresql.org/you
> or
>   https://commitfest.postgresql.org/me
> or something easily reachable like that.

+1 for this design.

I did think putting something on the home page was reasonable when I
first heard about it, but I think this is a better idea.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com



Re: Next commitfest app release is planned for March 18th

From
Peter Eisentraut
Date:
On 04.03.25 02:21, Jelte Fennema-Nio wrote:
> 6. The "latest email" column now shows "time since" (e.g. 1 week ago)
> instead of an exact timestamp. You can still see the exact timestamp
> by hovering over the cell.

Another small complaint: I don't like this style of relative times.  (I 
have also complained about it for the buildfarm status in the past.)  I 
suppose both styles are useful like 50% of the time, but I'll tell you 
some of my reasoning:

1) It is often more useful to eyeball whether a patch was last updated 
in 2025-01-XX or 2025-02-XX or 2025-03-XX.  It doesn't really matter how 
many days or weeks that was, it matters more where in the commitfest 
cadence the update happened.

2) Similarly, for recently updated entries it is more useful to see 
whether something was updated this week or last week.  "3 days ago" 
could be earlier this week, or last week, or just before the weekend, so 
effectively 1 day ago.  This is sometimes useful, and the relative 
specification hides that.

3) The mental overhead of analyzing something like "3 months, 3 weeks 
ago", which is non-decimal, negative, and does not consistently align 
vertically, is just a lot.




Re: Next commitfest app release is planned for March 18th

From
Jelte Fennema-Nio
Date:
On Tue, 4 Mar 2025 at 16:29, Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org> wrote:
> Another small complaint: I don't like this style of relative times.  (I
> have also complained about it for the buildfarm status in the past.)  I
> suppose both styles are useful like 50% of the time, but I'll tell you
> some of my reasoning:

So it's currently using Django its default "timesince" function. I
think we can probably modify that a bit to fit better with the
commitfest purpose.

> 1) It is often more useful to eyeball whether a patch was last updated
> in 2025-01-XX or 2025-02-XX or 2025-03-XX.  It doesn't really matter how
> many days or weeks that was, it matters more where in the commitfest
> cadence the update happened.

I'm not entirely sure what your intent here is. Do you actually just
want to know the month part, then Dec, Jan, Feb could work.

Or are you using the month part as a proxy for knowing how many
commitfests ago the last update was. If so, what would be good
descriptions then? And when would the cutoff from relative times be
for these more coarse descriptions? e.g. use "ago" if something is
less than a month ago. And then go for commitfests, instead of months.
So 1 commitfest ago, 2 commitfests ago etc.

> 2) Similarly, for recently updated entries it is more useful to see
> whether something was updated this week or last week.  "3 days ago"
> could be earlier this week, or last week, or just before the weekend, so
> effectively 1 day ago.  This is sometimes useful, and the relative
> specification hides that.

How about simply using the names of the week days instead of n days
ago. So on a Wednesday each previous day would be called the
following:
- yesterday
- last Monday
- last Saturday
- last Sunday
- last Friday
- last Thursday
- 1 week ago

> 3) The mental overhead of analyzing something like "3 months, 3 weeks
> ago", which is non-decimal, negative, and does not consistently align
> vertically, is just a lot.

Yeah, I agree with this. Two levels of precision is a bit excessive.
Although I'm not sure that the alignment problem actually applies
because this column is right-aligned.

I'll make sure to remove that.



Re: Next commitfest app release is planned for March 18th

From
Peter Eisentraut
Date:
On 04.03.25 11:33, Jelte Fennema-Nio wrote:
> I'm curious if there was anything specific that you used the old
> homepage for. Especially things you did often that are now harder to
> do. The only things I used on the homepage were:
> 1. Going to the "In Progress" and "Open" commitfest (usually with one
> of the links that filter for patches related to me).
> 2. Going to the most-recently "Closed" commitfest to move/close my
> previously submitted patches.
> 3. Search for commitfest entries by Message-ID
> 
> I agree that the new homepage now hides the hierarchy of the site, but
> I'd say that most people using it probably don't really have to know
> about that hierarchy. At least not care so much that it should be on
> the initial page. I definitely have never clicked on a link for a
> commitfest that's older than a year.

I think the option of having a list of things that I'm involved in as an 
author *or* reviewer is actually very useful and something I have wanted 
from time to time.  But that is apparently not accessible using the 
normal search/filter mechanism, because that is *and*.  If that were 
somehow available, then I could just bookmark something like

commitfest.postgresql.org/current/?author=-3&reviewer=-3&option=or

You could even, if people like this overall idea, make this a redirect 
from commitfest.postgresql.org/.  Because then I have context and this 
makes sense in the hierarchy of the site, and I can work from there to 
adjust the filters.

The problem now is that the home page is a unicorn.  You can't get to 
that listing in any other way, and you can't make similar listing by 
starting from that listing and making adjustments to the filter.

I still think, however, that the homepage should provide overview and 
not bombard you with too much content immediately.  What is a 
commitfest, which commitfest exists, how many have existed, when is the 
next one, is there a next one, I think that helps people get context. 
After all, we want them to get used to the system and stick around.

Another possible concern is that if you log in and have no patches and 
have not signed up to review anything, then the default listing just 
show you nothing?

>> How does one get back to the old homepage?  I figured it out, you click
>> the "Archive" button.  Why is that a button?  Also, the row of buttons
>> is now seemingly a mix of actions on the current commit fest mixed with
>> site navigation.
> 
> That's primarily to mirror the style of the commitfest page a bit.
> i.e. Most of the buttons there are also links, i.e. "New patch" and
> all the items under "Shortcuts"

Ok, but "New patch" still feels like an action, and "Shortcuts" is a 
drop-down.  But "Archive" is really just a link to a different page 
without any (current or future) state changes.  You could also imagine 
"Archive" as an action, like "archive this", in which case a button 
would be more appropriate.




Re: Next commitfest app release is planned for March 18th

From
Peter Geoghegan
Date:
On Mon, Mar 3, 2025 at 8:21 PM Jelte Fennema-Nio <me@jeltef.nl> wrote:
> 1. Major change: The homepage is revamped completely! It now shows a
> dashboard of open patches where you are author/reviewer/committer if
> you are logged in. These patches are ordered & grouped in a hopefully
> useful way. If you're not logged in it will show you the current
> commitfest. See screenshot for an example. The old list of all
> commitfests is moved to the /archive (which has a button on the
> homepage).

This looks very much like what I had in mind. Thanks!

> Peter Geoghegan suggested adding a "dashboard" of this
> kind. Feedback on this is very welcome, but depending on the
> complexity I don't know when I'll get to it. I'll be a bit more busy
> the next few weeks and also have some holidays planned.

But here you say that you *haven't* worked on what I had in mind,
which is confusing.

Are you saying that you have yet to implement a version of this that
shows everything (every patch that isn't closed out) for all
commitfests? What you've come up with only works for the current
commitfest, and not the next one?

--
Peter Geoghegan



Re: Next commitfest app release is planned for March 18th

From
Jelte Fennema-Nio
Date:
On Tue, 4 Mar 2025 at 17:31, Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie> wrote:
> > Peter Geoghegan suggested adding a "dashboard" of this
> > kind. Feedback on this is very welcome, but depending on the
> > complexity I don't know when I'll get to it. I'll be a bit more busy
> > the next few weeks and also have some holidays planned.
>
> But here you say that you *haven't* worked on what I had in mind,
> which is confusing.
>
> Are you saying that you have yet to implement a version of this that
> shows everything (every patch that isn't closed out) for all
> commitfests? What you've come up with only works for the current
> commitfest, and not the next one?

I meant to say: I roughly implemented what Peter G described... Ideas
to further improve it are very welcome, but it might take a while
until I'm able to do that.



Re: Next commitfest app release is planned for March 18th

From
Peter Geoghegan
Date:
On Tue, Mar 4, 2025 at 12:02 PM Jelte Fennema-Nio <me@jeltef.nl> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 4 Mar 2025 at 17:31, Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie> wrote:
> > > Peter Geoghegan suggested adding a "dashboard" of this
> > > kind. Feedback on this is very welcome, but depending on the
> > > complexity I don't know when I'll get to it. I'll be a bit more busy
> > > the next few weeks and also have some holidays planned.
> >
> > But here you say that you *haven't* worked on what I had in mind,
> > which is confusing.
> >
> > Are you saying that you have yet to implement a version of this that
> > shows everything (every patch that isn't closed out) for all
> > commitfests? What you've come up with only works for the current
> > commitfest, and not the next one?
>
> I meant to say: I roughly implemented what Peter G described... Ideas
> to further improve it are very welcome, but it might take a while
> until I'm able to do that.

Got it.

From the looks of the screen shot that you posted (can't seem to find
the same dashboard view on https://commitfest-test.postgresql.org?),
this is *exactly* what I had in mind -- I don't know what I said that
you haven't fully taken into account here? It's just a screen shot,
but as far as it goes it looks great.

Did you mean that you have general doubts about the general quality of
the dashboard code? As in, the code itself is rough? Seems unlikely
that that was what you meant, since you also seemed to say that you're
planning another release (i.e. deploying to production) on March 18.

I'm fairly neutral on the question of whether or not the homepage
should just be the dashboard for logged in users. Though I do think
it's important that the new dashboard is highly discoverable, so that
people know that it exists without having to be told about it.

It'd be nice if at some point you also added the ability to
star/favorite/like patches -- I'm thinking of something that worked a
little bit like starring a gmail thread. Any such patches would appear
towards the end of the dashboard page, in its own section,
independently of whether I as a user am involved or not involved in
the patch. This would be private information, visible only to the
individual user that favorited the patch -- a mere bookmark.

--
Peter Geoghegan