Progress on Pull Request Processing

In his blog post “On Contributions, Pride and Cockiness ” in May, MariaDB Foundation CEO Kaj Arnö spoke of a renewed focus on MariaDB Server pull requests. Processing community pull requests in good time is a key part of our mission, but we’d been falling behind, and receiving justifiable criticism. At the time of that article, there were 167 open pull requests, with many open for far too long, and contributors were frustrated.

We set out two end goals:

  • Reduce backlog of open pull requests
  • Motivate contributors to make more contributions

There’s been no noticeable uptick in contributions since then, but we’ve made good progress in reducing the number of open pull requests. …

On Contributions, Pride and Cockiness

At MariaDB Foundation, we are proud of MariaDB Server getting plenty of contributions. But we don’t want to get cocky, so here is an update about where we stand, and what we want to make happen.

First, we have shown our contribution pride in several places. On 15 February 2019, I tweeted

Repeating: On code contributions, #MariaDB beats #MySQL 1009 to 247: We have over a thousand (1009) closed pull requests on GitHub (and 179 open), MySQL has 247 closed (1 open).

In our Annual Report 2018, we spent several pages, talking about pull requests and patches, showing code contribution statistics. …

Protected branches – ensuring code quality in git

In order to ensure that new (or changed) code does not break anything, there is an extensive test suite that is run to catch regressions during MariaDB Server development. Developers are expected to run the test suite locally and, after pushing the code to the remote repository, also check that the more extensive tests run on Travis CI and in particular Buildbot do not find any regressions either. However, sometimes developers are sloppy, make mistakes, don’t check the test results and in a hurry to just push their code change on the main branches, and then the test suite gives errors for everybody else from that point on. …

Community contributions to MariaDB

One of the goals of the MariaDB Foundation is to help new contributors understand the source code and to lower the barrier for new participants. One way to measure this is to look at the number of pull requests received and accepted, as these mostly reflect community contributions. The figures below are for the main server only, not any of the connectors or tools hosted on the Foundation’s GitHub account, and for the period 1 January to 1 July 2017.

Number of GitHub pull requests received: 126 (+113% Year-on-Year)
Number of pull requests reviewed: 102 (+76% YoY)
Number of contributors: 28 (+22% YoY)
Number of reviewers: 13 (+44% YoY)

By comparison, here are the equivalent figures for MySQL:
Number of GitHub pull requests received: 35 (-10% Year-on-Year)
Number of contributors: 19 (+27% YoY)

Although the MariaDB codebase is large and complex, we’re happy to see that there have been some interesting and important contributions from the community. …

MariaDB moves development to Github

Today marks a milestone in terms of the MariaDB project – going forward, the MariaDB project plans to use Github and git for source code management. The migration happens from Launchpad and the bzr tool.

The 10.1 server development (under heavy development now) will happen on Github. You can check it out here: https://github.com/MariaDB/server. Feel free to watch, star or even fork the code, and send us contributions!

Previous maria-captains should now provide their Github IDs so that they can be accorded similar status. Send the IDs to the maria-developers mailing list. …