Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Andrew <afrayedknot AT thefrayedknot.armory.com>]

On Sun, May 07, 2006 at 12:00:51AM +0200, Flavien Bridault wrote:
> 
> 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.

There are other people with access to stable-rc/stable. Its not just
the gatekeepers of stable that can have access, the distinction is
that gatekeepers say what can and cannot go in. Once they say it can go
in, anyone (with access) can execute that command. More to the point,
there can be a sub-team of gurus that help with the mechanics of
stable/stable-rc, while a few experienced people stay gatekeepers. The
stable-release sub-team isn't exclusive to Eric Arwed and Seth either. I
think the main requirement is having the necessary scm skills.

I think the main place more help is needed is in fixing the bugs themselves.
Once they're fixed the process of reviewing and moving those changes to
stable/stable-rc is comparatively a small amount of extra work.

Lastly, as the bug backlog decreases, stable releases can be more
frequent. This release cycle is long because the last one is long and
there was more churn in test (and thus more bugs introduced). If this
cycle is shorter, then the next one can be even shorter, and so on. It'll
happen gradually, but the amount of work in pulling fixes into stable
ought to decrease over time. Of course, the best way to help that system
out is to focus on fixing as many bugs as possible :-)

-Andrew

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