[yt-dev] Proposed change to development practices

[Britton Smith]

I want to reaffirm my support for having what Nathan has now referred to as
a "maintainer."  I don't see a way of upholding procedural complexity
without the intervention of an officially designated human being.  Who is
for/against this?

On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 2:17 AM, Matthew Turk <matthewturk at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Britton,
>
> I think there are a few ways to address this.
>
> One would be to encourage developers to do all their day-to-day work on
> stable.  Another would be for all bugfix PRs to get automatically grafted
> (and squashed) onto the stable branch or the yt branch.
>
> One thing we also have fallen away from, which we had for a while, was the
> very rigorous and regular release schedule...
>
> On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 8:46 AM, Britton Smith <brittonsmith at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> yt-dev mailing list
>>> yt-dev at lists.spacepope.org
>>> http://lists.spacepope.org/listinfo.cgi/yt-dev-spacepope.org
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>>
>>
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