openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Olivier Dony <odo@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2013-10-25 14:30, Fabien Pinckaers wrote:
> Ok, I checked with Olivier and Christophe; It looks like OCB branches
> have been wrongly registered in our runbot by a partner.
>
> IMHO, the community should organize OCB branches in another way:
>    - a dedicated ~ocb team
>    - but uses official projects for server, addons, web
>
> The way it's organized now, it's not even possible in launchpad to do a
> merge proposal between an OCB branch and an official one.
>
> Even if runbot supports this, it's not designed to work in this way;
> e.g.; it does not test feature branches due to this.
>
> I asked Olivier to resend a more detailed email with a proposition on
> how to organize OCB branches (mostly putting them in the right project)
> so that we can ease collaboration.


There's a bit of confusion here, and it's my fault for not following up earlier 
to the discussion we had during the last open days regarding the OCB branches.

The current "ocb" team on runbot is a manual build configuration that someone 
has added with all the branches hardcoded. This does not work well and we need 
to be able to do a regular registration of the "ocb" team where all branches 
are auto-discovered and followed, and the main ones marked as sticky.

However, this requires a few changes to the way the OCB branches are structured 
and managed, and we discussed this during the last open days with Stefan and 
the key OCB contributors (at that time).
Basically the OCB branches should not live in separate projects but would be 
seen as community-maintained series in the official OpenERP projects.
This would have many advantages, such as:
- simpler/better runbot branch tracking
- better visibility and clear meaning of the OCB branches purpose (as series)
- no need to make separate MPs when proposing a patch to official + OCB
- bug reports assigned to relevant series instead of 2 projects
- simpler merge process between OCB and official branches, with possible 
fast-forward path into the official distribution

Based on the preliminary discussion with Stefan, it seems the necessary changes 
could be done on the OCB branch management to allow this. The necessary OCB 
series have been added to the official projects already.

Once this is done, we will be able to setup runbot with the right branches and 
sticky rules. And even better, we'll also be able to define a periodical merge 
process between the OCB branches and the official branches, reducing the delta 
and risk of error + divergence. This seems to be aligned with the rationale 
behind the OCB initiative [1].

Only a few obstacles remain before this can become a reality:
1/ The OCB branches would need to be relocated under the official projects
2/ The OCB branch management process needs to be adapted accordingly
3/ Compliance with the OpenERP stable policy [2] should be added to the review 
checklist for OCB branches, and the current branches reviewed in this light
4/ (Option) In order to allow for some degree of non-compliant changes, an 
"experimental" version of the OCB branches could be forked. It would not be 
recommended for production and not merged back into the official distribution.

Stefan, does this accurately describe the options we discussed?

What do the main OCB contributors think about it?
And then... how do we proceed to get the next steps done?

Thanks!


[1] 
http://openerp-community.2306076.n4.nabble.com/Openerp-community-Proposal-for-a-community-backports-project-td4641940.html
[2] We will add a formal list of the stable criterions in the documentation, 
but the main one is to make sure a patch can never cause an error for users who 
periodically reinstall/update their source code without using `-u`. Draft list: 
http://pad.openerp.com/stable-policy