--
Best regards,
Oleg Gelbukh
On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 1:02 PM, Bogdan Dobrelya
<bdobrelia@xxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:bdobrelia@xxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Hello.
On 12/10/2013 09:14 PM, Dmitry Borodaenko wrote:
All,
We still have a few pain points left in our development
process that I
think are easy to fix with a bunch of simple rules. I think
releasing
4.0 will be less painful if we try to address these.
1. Branch management for maintenance releases
We already had this discussion during 3.2.1 release cycle, and
agreed
to follow the approach that is in line with what OpenStack and
most
other free software projects are following. Still, I think we
should
do better at actually following the process we agreed to.
To see how good we were at following it for 3.2.1, open two
terminal
windows and run:
git whatchanged 3.2..3.2-fixes
git whatchanged 3.2..master
and for each commit in 3.2-fixes, try to find a matching fix in
master. Last time I checked there were still many cases where
bugfixes
were merged to 3.2-fixes before (or even without) merging them to
master. Did anyone actually check that we're not missing any
important
fixes from 3.2.1 in 4.0?
We should create a new stable/4.0 branch as soon as 4.0 code
freeze is
announced (ideally, the announcement itself should direct
committers
to the new branch). Reviewers should REJECT all commits to
stable/4.0
that have not been merged into master, unless a justification is
provided in the COMMIT MESSAGE.
Can Jenkins help us by -1 such patches?
I.e. Jenkins could put -1 to any patch targeted for non-master,
unless its commits were found in master.
2. Management and code review of feature development branches
Yet another thing that everyone seems to agree on is that huge
long-lived feature branches with many commits and thousands of
lines
worth of changes are evil and dangerous. Luckily, the move to
Gerrit
will make it hard enough to maintain and merge multi-commit
branches,
and will push people towards committing and merging changes in
smaller
self-sufficient chunks.
That should we do for long running researches, such as HA improvements
(started at 3.1, targeted to 4.1 only), or torrent based provisioning?
Should we melt down hundreds of commits into a single patch in WIP
branch,
before submitting new feature to review?
A recent negative example is the fuel-library pull request
#911 that
has merged 104 duplicate commits from ancient alternative
history into
master, instead of simply rebasing a single commit. The only
way to
prevent something like this from happening is to summarily reject
changes that are too large and/or contain messy revision history.
Jenkins could come to help here as well. E.g. -1, if any commit in
PR are
already present in target branch's history.
The other side of the same problem is holding back small
reasonable
changes for too long, placing unnecessary burden on authors to
keep
rebasing their change on top of other changes that got merged
earlier.
For example, my own fuel-docs pull request #67 sat unreviewed
for a
week only to be obsoleted by the move of the repo to
StackForge (after
being obsoleted couple more times by changes that were merged
ahead of
it). I suspect most other developers had similar experiences.
On top
of obvious frustration, holding a change back tempts the author to
keep piling changes onto the same request instead of creating
a new
review request on top of updated master for their next set of
changes.
To use the same example, most of the third commit on #67
should really
have been a separate pull request.
The fix is once again rather obvious: when going through reviews,
start with fixes for critical bugs, then go through remaining
reviews
starting with the least recently updated ones. Don't merge a
review
request if there's an older review request that can also be
merged.
I'm using this link to see all our outstanding review requests:
https://review.openstack.org/#/q/status:open+project:^stackforge/fuel-.*,n,z
Right now I see that there are review requests that have +1
from CI
and from reviewers (meaning they can be merged) sitting unchanged
since Nov 25, and a few unreviewed requests going as far back
as Nov
3. We shouldn't have a request sit untouched by an approver
for more
than a week, let alone a month. If there's a any reason you
don't want
to merge it, give it -1 and explain. Otherwise, there's no
reason not
to give it +2. If you have time to review and merge a newer
request,
you have time for that older one, too.
3. Bugs triage
Moving our bug tracking to public launchpad was an important step
towards opening up our development process, now we should improve
visibility of our bugs triage and release management processes. In
addition to announcing target release dates, we should also
have well
defined release criteria (for example, no critical bugs
affecting the
upcoming release, no more than 5 bugs with high importantce,
etc.),
and documented rules on how to set importance of a bug. We
don't have
to be rigid and beaurocratic about it, but having documented
criteria
will help all participants of the process prioritize their own
work
and understand how it fits into the state of the whole project. It
will also help avoid situations like missing an important
bugfix in a
release, by forcing us to review priorities of all open bugs
before
announcing a release.
--
Best regards,
Bogdan Dobrelya,
Researcher TechLead, Mirantis, Inc.
+38 (066) 051 07 53
Skype bogdando_at_yahoo.com <http://bogdando_at_yahoo.com>
38, Lenina ave.
Kharkov, Ukraine
www.mirantis.com <http://www.mirantis.com>
www.mirantis.ru <http://www.mirantis.ru>
bdobrelia@xxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:bdobrelia@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
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