unity-dev team mailing list archive

["Stephen M. Webb" <stephen.webb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 01/07/2013 09:40 AM, Didier Roche wrote:
> Le 07/01/2013 15:09, Ted Gould a écrit :
>> On Mon, 2013-01-07 at 07:35 +0100, Didier Roche wrote:
>>> Also, that we have to do that because there is a bad history of committing to ABI and API stability, remember that
>>> normally, in every normal upstream project, such a breakage ask to change the soname, and in this case, we will know
>>> beforehand on which version of the -dev package to build-dep. We are just workarounding here bad upstream practice.
>>
>> The problem is that we're not talking about released versions, which certainly should manage their API/ABI with proper
>> SO numbers etc, we're talking about development trunk.  We've removed the ability to have a playground before
>> committing to an API that developers are committing to.  We can't expect merging to trunk to be a long term commitment
>> to API or ABI stability.  Doing a release is saying "this is baked" and we'll commit to it, proposing a merge is not.
> 
> Indeed, we removed a playground, but that was 2 cycles beforehand already. Starting the 11.10 release development cycle,
> we went to "trunk is sacred" thanks to the acceptance criteria and that's how we start raising the quality bar. This
> means that trunk is not a playfield anymore, but rather when something hits trunk, the quality is high enough to pass tests.
> 
> You can take whatever other branch you want, like calling it "next foo feature", then, using that one and having other
> people and yourself branching from it, merge into it, writing tests, experimenting with other ppas containing it. Once
> it's baked and ready for more people to use it, you then propose this feature branch for a full review against trunk.
> After having it accepted and tests passing, the feature, merged to trunk is then pushed to ubuntu.

So exactly what problem was supposed to be solved by eliminating upstream releases for a project and blurring the
distinction between upstream and distro if it requires having a separate 'upstream' branch where all the work is done
and then a single upstream branch is frozen and released into trunk?

Don't get me wrong, trunk needs to be sacred. Requiring downstreams to be aware of all upstream changes that get pushed
on them, and for upstreams to do all the work in downstreams if they break things before each and every commit anywhere
is just not working.  It sounds to me like this current experiment is turning up some negative results (some of which
were explicitly predicted) and we might need to adjust some theory or parameters.

-- 
Stephen M. Webb  <stephen.webb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>