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[Flavien Bridault <vlaaad AT sourcemage.org>]

Le samedi 06 mai 2006 à 12:21 -0700, seth AT swoolley.homeip.net a écrit :
> On Sat, May 06, 2006 at 12:42:03PM +0200, Flavien Bridault wrote:
> > Just a small question (maybe silly :-/ ), I agree that we need
> > gatekeepers to grant the integration in stable-rc; but do you really
> > need them to perform the integration ? Can't we trust the maintainer to
> > do that ? 
> 
> No, we cannot trust them, for a few reasons.
> 
> I've seen too many bad integrations to not trust people to do p4 diff 
> (or similar) to double-check the integration.
> 
> This is more true for stable than for stable-rc, but I would still like 
> to see control on stable-rc.  'advisory closed' just isn't hard enough 
> for me, especially when I want to know of _every_ integrate to 
> stable-rc and know that the people doing it know what they are doing.  I 
> explain this more in response to your next question.
> 
> > Or is this technically to much different from an integration
> > from devel to test ? 
> 
> It's not much technically different, even though there are technical 
> differences in layout (since we include the version).  The most 
> problematic part is that integrates to stable-rc and stable often 
> involve cherry-picking.  I don't really want to leave that to just any 
> guru.  Our grimoire structure is complex enough now with FUNCTIONS, 
> etc., that it's a non-trivial operation.  I want people who know to 
> integrate the smallest or least intrusive change and can understand the 
> ramifications of their action on the whole.  Early gurus don't 
> necessarily get this.  I want to open up guruing in the trunk, but keep 
> stable release candidates and release branches to be tightly qa'd.  If 
> we let any guru access stable-rc, we have to be more careful who we let 
> have access to test (the trunk).
> 
> Moreover, while stable-rc might not seem so important to have tight 
> control over, the fact is that once stable-rc is branched, we start 
> testing immediately on the entire thing.  That means that at that point 
> anything integrated after testing has to be re-tested or limited such 
> that testing can be encapsulated to the specific change (unit tested).  
> Some changes cannot be well unit tested and that's why we need tight 
> control over this process.  Unless we want to extend our stable-rc 
> testing to be atomic against any change (making global retesting
> requisite), we cannot give just anybody access.
> 
> Remember, once code enters the QA process, the less developers can 
> mingle with it, the cleaner the final output will be.  This of course is 
> weighed against flexibility, but with each ounce of flexibility we add, 
> we need to add a pound of process to account for that.
> 
> > I could even imagine (but maybe we don't have the technology yet ;-) )
> > to allow a temporary access to the spell in stable-rc once the
> > gatekeeper granted the integration.
> 
> Even if we had this, for the above reason, particularly with regard to 
> testing processes, I would be uncomfortable with it.
> 
> Seth

Thank you for your answer, this is more or less what I thought. I rather
agree with that, but the only point that scares me is that it seems a
*huge* work to do for few people ! Say if I'm wrong, but only Eric,
Arwed and you have such an access to stable-rc/stable ? Eric and Arwed
already have a lot of work with their PL/TL work and all the hard work
they do in devel/test. I wonder if this is not dangerous at some point
to only rely on three developers, and exclude all the others.

Moreover, I don't understand (but I should have missed those
discussions, please excuse me... :-/ ) what you consider to integrate a
new version of a spell in stable-rc ? Before it was every month (and
that was very bad ;-) ), but now ? I have sometimes even some
difficulties to follow the changes on udev in the disk section because
many people play with it (and I thank them for their help... :-) ). But
I really wish you a lot of will the next time you will have to integrate
it in stable-rc with all the new rules ! So how do you deal with that ?
Or is it my responsibility as a maintainer to fill a bug to request the
integration ? Excuse me if I ask obvious things but I'm quite
confused... :-/

So my final word is : "Don't you need some more people ?" But once
again, maybe I misunderstood and there are already open positions ?
-- 
Flavien Bridault

Disk, Graphics, Graphics-libs sections Guru
Source Mage GNU/Linux - http://www.sourcemage.org

irc: vlaaad
jabber: vlaaad AT amessage.be

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