Re: Coping with the pull-before-you-push model

[Joshua Jensen <jjensen@workspacewhiz.com>]

  ----- Original Message -----
From: Jeff King
Date: 9/10/2010 8:15 AM
> On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 03:35:21PM +1000, Jon Seymour wrote:
>
>> This is probably the cultural shift that is hardest for enterprises to
>> accept - why do I need a _person_ to do this _manual_ work when tools
>> like {insert favourite non-DVCS here} can do this for me? To
>> management, this looks like a step-backwards.
> Bear in mind that you can still shift to a maintainer model, but keep
> the maintainer automated. That is, you can queue up "to-pull" heads, and
> then have an automated process pull them one by one and do some basic QA
> (does it merge, does it build, does it pass automated tests, etc). Which
> is not that different from what many shops do in the non-maintainer
> model, except that when you break the build, the maintainer process
> notices _before_ publishing the merged tip, so everybody won't try to
> build on your broken crap.
>
Do you know of any existing software that does this?  This may be ideal 
in the short term.
> I still prefer a human maintainer, because they can do things like
> reorder the queue manually (or outright reject flaky topics) to get more
> sensible merges, or do easy but non-trivial merges themselves to avoid
> kicking code back to the developer.
>
I agree with you concerning how valuable a human maintainer is.

Josh