[yt-dev] proposed change to development process

[Matthew Turk]

Hi Britton,

I've thought through a bit more, and I'm coming around to having multiple
heads.  If each one had a feature name, and we didn't get too many (i.e., a
h-yt-dra haha) then perhaps this would be a fine situation.  Avoiding PRs
between repos means consolidating code review, which is a positive thing,
as well.  By focusing on *features* rather than the blanked "experimental"
we would be in a better situation to deal with situations like this, we
could still do feature work, and also preserve stability.

-Matt

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
>
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>
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