[yt-dev] Proposed change to development practices

Britton Smith brittonsmith at gmail.com
Fri Jan 16 06:46:04 PST 2015


Hi Nathan,

This is a good discussion to be having and I definitely agree that bugfixes
need to be making their way to the stable branch in real time.  The added
complication in procedure does worry me, specifically for someone whose
first ever PR is to fix a bug they find, but I imagine even experienced
developers are going to have trouble remembering.

I think this might go a lot more smoothly if we had someone officially
designated for this duty, their job being to immediately push bugfixes
to/from stable.  If we had that, then we could continue to have all PRs go
into the development branch.  What do people think about this?  If it were
a rotating position, changing hands after releases, it might work.

Britton

On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 10:02 AM, Suoqing JI <suoqing at physics.ucsb.edu>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I agree to the suggestion that the bugfix should also go into the stable
> branch.
>
> as soon as a bugfix pull request to stable goes in, there should be an
> accompanying merge from the stable branch into the yt branch to ensure that
> both branches get bug fixes.
>
>
> This is one possible way of doing it, so we can avoid the potential
> “mixing” of the new features in yt branch into the stable branch:
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7165989/mercurial-apply-a-bugfix-change-from-stable-named-branch-to-dev-branch
>
>
> Best wishes,
>
> --
> Suoqing JI
> Ph.D Student
> Department of Physics
> University of California, Santa Barbara
> CA 93106, USA
>
> On Jan 13, 2015, at 3:44 PM, Nathan Goldbaum <nathan12343 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Now that yt 3.1 is making its way out the door, I'd like to come back to a
> discussion we had last year about bugfixes.
>
> I've made a pull request to the YTEP repository that summarized the change
> I'm proposing:
>
>
> https://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/ytep/pull-request/48/modify-ytep-1776-to-require-that-bugfixes/diff
>
> Basically, I think bugfixes need to go to the stable branch rather than
> the yt branch.  Currently, all new changes go to the yt branch.  While this
> does simplify our development practices, this makes it difficult for us to
> release new versions that only include fixes for bugs.  Instead, even minor
> version releases that are cut from the yt branch include new features and
> API breakages.
>
> I think this approach violates the principle of least surprise for users
> who have download a bugfix release.
>
> The solution, I think, is to ensure bugfixes are only applied to the
> stable branch.  This will ensure that we can straightforwardly do bugfix
> releases that inlude only bugfixes and that new features and API changes
> are isolated to the more "experimental" yt branch.
>
> This does come with some possible down sides.  In particular, there will
> likely be some confusion as we switch our development practices.  In
> addition, new contributors may find it difficult to split pull requests
> into new features that should go to the yt branch and bugfixes that should
> go to the stable branch.  It also adds a new maintenance burden: as soon as
> a bugfix pull request to stable goes in, there should be an accompanying
> merge from the stable branch into the yt branch to ensure that both
> branches get bugfixes.  This gets more complicated if the bugfix looks
> different in the yt branch and the stable branch.
>
> All that said, I think these new maintenance burdens can be overcome with
> a bit of vigilance and maybe some new tooling.
>
> I've probably said enough about this.  What do you all think?  Comments
> and concerns are very welcome.
>
> Best,
>
> Nathan Goldbaum
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