[yt-dev] proposed change to development process

[Matthew Turk]

Personally, I would *like* to see one yt head, one stable head.  That
doesn't mean it's the right thing to do, though.
On Sep 10, 2015 4:10 PM, "Britton Smith" <brittonsmith at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Matt,
>
> So I guess "multiple heads" even with multiple bookmarks is off the table
>> now, if I read the rest of the thread correctly?  If so, can we figure out
>> a way to allow experimental stuff into "yt" and then move most folks onto
>> "stable"?
>>
>
> By my count, Nathan was relenting somewhat under the weight of my walls of
> text and Cameron was on board despite some concerns.  What are your
> thoughts on having multiple development heads?
>
> Britton
>
>
>> On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 1:52 PM, Britton Smith <brittonsmith at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi everyone,
>>>
>>> I had some ideas for improving the yt development process that I
>>> wanted to run by everyone.  This can be discussed further at our
>>> upcoming team meeting and if people are in favor, I will issue a pull
>>> request to the relevant YTEP.
>>>
>>> STATEMENT OF PROBLEM
>>> Currently, development proceeds roughly as follows.  The two main
>>> active branches within the central yt repository are *yt* and *stable*.
>>> The tip of *stable* is the latest release and the *yt* branch is the de
>>> facto "development version" of the code.  Until recently, we have not
>>> been very good at regularly scheduled minor releases and so the *stable*
>>> branch sits for quite some time with many bugs that are fixed within
>>> the development branch.  This effectively makes *stable* unusable and
>>> pushes most users to the *yt* branch.
>>>
>>> When new features are developed, pull requests are issued to the
>>> single head of the *yt* branch.  Because this is the version most people
>>> are actually using, the current policy is to not allow PR with new
>>> functionality to be accepted until they are 100% ready (full
>>> functionality, tests, docs, etc).  As we have already seen, this makes
>>> collaborative development very cumbersome, as it requires people to
>>> create forks of the fork from which the PR originates.  They then must
>>> issue PRs to that fork after which time the original PR is updated.
>>> The current volume render refactor is the perfect example of this.
>>>
>>> PROPOSED SOLUTION
>>> Before I lay out the proposed solution, I want to list a number of
>>> recent developments that I think will make this possible:
>>> 1. Nathan's new script for backporting changes now keeps *stable* and
>>> *yt*
>>>    synced on bugfixes.
>>> 2. We have returned to doing minor releases containing only bugfixes,
>>>    thanks again to Nathan's hard work.  This and point 1 means that
>>>    users are once again safe to be on *stable*, and now *should* be
>>> there
>>>    most of the time.
>>> 3. Bitbucket now supports bookmarks, meaning that PRs can be issued to
>>>    specific bookmarks instead of to branches or heads named only by the
>>>    changeset hash.
>>> 4. The weekly PR triage hangouts are making it easier to process PRs
>>>    and also providing a place to strategize getting larger PRs
>>>    accepted.  Thanks to Hilary for keeping this going.
>>>
>>> With the above in mind, I propose the following:
>>> 1. Create a "development" bookmark to sit at the tip of the *yt*
>>>    branch.  All PRs containing relatively small new features are
>>>    issued to this.  The requirements for acceptance remain the same:
>>>    PRs accepted to "development" must contain all intended
>>>    functionality and be fully documented.  This allows the
>>>    "development" bookmark to be defined explicitly as everything that
>>>    will be included in the next major release.
>>> 2. Large new features should have a corresponding YTEP that has been
>>>    accepted.  After the YTEP has been accepted, a PR should be issued
>>>    to the *yt* branch.  After some initial discussion, this PR is pulled
>>>    into the main yt repo with a bookmark named after the feature.
>>>    Once this has happened, developers can now issue new PRs
>>>    specifically to this bookmark.  This is effectively what we have
>>>    now with the volume render work in the "experimental" bookmark,
>>>    only we would rename the bookmark to something like "vr-refactor".
>>>    As with PRs issued directly to "development", only after the new
>>>    feature is 100% ready shall it be merged into the "development"
>>>    bookmark.
>>> 3. We continue to make use of the PR triage hangouts to establish when
>>>    large features are ready to be merged.
>>>
>>> I believe this will have the following benefits:
>>> 1. Large, new features can be developed collaboratively without the
>>>    need for forks of forks of forks.
>>> 2. New, underdevelopment features are more accessible to the larger
>>>    community by simply updating to named bookmarks from the main repo
>>>    (no need for "just pull these changes from my fork").
>>> 3. The "development" branch is preserved as a place only for
>>>    ready-to-be-released features (i.e., polished and documented).
>>>
>>>
>>> All told, this is really just a small tweak on our current process.
>>> Please comment with any thoughts, or even a +/-1 if your feelings can
>>> be summed up thusly.
>>>
>>> Britton
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> yt-dev mailing list
>>> yt-dev at lists.spacepope.org
>>> http://lists.spacepope.org/listinfo.cgi/yt-dev-spacepope.org
>>>
>>>
>>
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