[U-Boot] Notes from the U-Boot BOF Meeting in Geneva 2012/07/12

[Graeme Russ <graeme.russ@gmail.com>]

Hi Stefan,

On 07/17/2012 08:37 PM, Stefan Roese wrote:
> On Tuesday 17 July 2012 01:11:01 Graeme Russ wrote:
>>> It was discussed whether to do some "automatic" merging of these
>>> per-custodian trees into a central next, but majority of people believed
>>> that the patch handling process should remain as unchanged as possible
>>> in sync with the "principle of least surprise".
>>
>> I agree that automatic merging is a 'Bad Thing(tm)'. But one thing I notice
>> (and I don't know if this is a recent thing) but there seems to be a case
>> of zero merge activity up to the closing of the merge window and then a
>> rash of merging just prior to the RCs. I favour a more continuous merge
>> strategy.
> 
> I favored the automatic merging at the conference mainly because of one 
> reason:
> 
> To detect potential merge conflicts as early as possible. And send the result 
> of this automated merge to the list (or a new list).

100% agree with first sentence. Worried about how much extra traffic an
auto-build would cause if it was mailing the list as well

> In combination with (automated) nightly builds this not only catches merge 
> conflicts but also build problems. All this should be pretty easy to automate. 
> And it moves the detection of those problems closer to the submission of the 
> patches. So we (and the original patch authors) don't have to figure out what 
> the patch was all about weeks later.

I think U-Boot has reached the point that purely manual patch management is
not longer cutting the mustard.

Maybe it's time to seriously look at a gerrit + jenkins based solution?

Regards,

Graeme