launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think the list shrunk since I posted :-) but it's still a bit long.

On 23 September 2010 18:27, Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 9:12 AM, Monty Taylor <mordred@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> ...
>>> If you own the branch, it's your responsibility to get it landed or to
>>> abandon it. Even if you don't have commit privileges, it's your
>>> responsibility to find someone who does and get them to do it.
>>
>> FWIW, we've had really good luck in Drizzle with having a rotating merge
>> captain who does the landing of approved branches ... and while they're
>> handling merges that's all they do. I plan to replace that merge captain
>> with a program as soon as I can.
>>
>> Although I appreciate the principal of being responsible for follow
>> through, I'd argue that developers do not tend to be good at is
>> following manual processes.

We've had a patch pilot rotation in Bazaar and it's been a big
success, though we must not rest on it.  The emphasis is not on doing
automatable work but on giving people prompt help with adding tests
etc.

> It depends on what you mean. Doing tedious work that could be automated sucks.

+1, but there are some parts that need to be done by a team member,
specifically review and landing.

> I'm obsessed with my branches landing. Each branch I have lying around
> that's unmerged is a burning coal in my mind. I get a little zing of
> geekly pleasure when my change hits stable and I can delete my local
> copy of the branch. I'm kind of surprised that people are happy to
> wait for someone else to land their branch.

I have branches waiting to land and I'm certainly not happy about it.
Perhaps you mean "surprised people put up with it", and perhaps we can
work out what psychological/technical/process issues may cause that to
be true.  The old mps don't have any obvious reason in the comments
why they are stalled.

It seems to me:

 * some things get prompt review and others wait for a long time
 * a fair fraction of landings die with spurious errors (ie not
related to the proposed change); this is offputting if you're a new
contributor
 * i found it hard to get ec2 working; i'm sure it's a fairly shallow snag
 * if the proposer isn't a launchpad committer, and not able to land
it themselves, the thing tends to stall

-- 
Martin