Re: Slow DOWN, please!!!

Willy Tarreau
2008-05-01T05:10:38Z

On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 08:15:00PM -0400, Chris Shoemaker wrote:
> On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 01:12:21AM +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> > On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 12:39:01AM +0200, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> > > In fact, so many changes go in at a time during a merge window, that we often
> > > can't really say which of them causes the breakage observed by testers and
> > > bisection, that IMO should really be a last-resort tool, is used on the main
> > > debugging techinque.
> >
> > Maybe we could slightly improve the process by releasing more often, but
> > based on topics. Small sets of minimally-overlapping topics would get
> > merged in each release, and other topics would only be allowed to pull
> > fixes. That way everybody still gets some work merged, everybody tests
> > and problems are more easily spotted.
> >
> > I know this is in part what Andrew tries to do when proposing to
> > integrate trees, but maybe some approximate rules should be proposed
> > in order for developers to organize their works. This would begin
> > with announcing topics to be considered for next branch very early.
> > This would also make it more natural for developers to have creation
> > and bug-tracking phases.
>
> What would this look like, notionally? Say the releases were twice as
> frequent with Stage A and Stage B. How could the topic be grouped
> into the stages? Could bugfixes of any type be merged in either
> window? Would this only apply to "new" features, API changes, etc? or
> would maintenance-type changes have to be assigned to a stage, too?

bug fixes are of course always possible, just that we limit important
changes, i.e. the ones which randomly break and that take a lot of time
to track down because everyone has changed something.

> -chris

willy