bisect-ability

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Fri, 2020-06-19 at 11:13 +1000, Martin Schwenke wrote:
> On Fri, 19 Jun 2020 10:19:41 +1200, Andrew Bartlett via samba-
> technical
> <samba-technical at lists.samba.org> wrote:
> 
> > We hope this describes many of the to-date unwritten rules of Samba
> > development.  We would encourage more of these to be written down.
> 
> This is very nice!

Thanks!

> Just a couple of things...
> 
> I wasn't aware of bisect-ability as a hard and fast rule.  I think
> this
> is an excellent goal.  However, sometimes, very rarely, you end up
> with
> a choice between 10 bizarre commits that maintain bisect-ability
> versus
> one really obvious one that breaks it for a single commit.  I wonder
> if
> we can allow occasional build breaks that are clearly documented in
> their commit messages.  

I'm happy with that.

> That might upset someone who's all-night
> bisection just fell over on my broken commit but when they look at
> the
> commit message they will know it was intended and will know how to
> restart their bisection.  

Our scripts even restart for that! :-)

> I just feel as though sometimes there might
> be a tension between clarity and bisect-ability.  Not sure...

I think all our rules should be +/- a degree of engineering pragmatism.

This is hard to encode in rules (because then it isn't judgement any
more) but is critical because otherwise we gridlock like you suggest.

So tweaks most welcome - what I find hardest is to describe that in a
way that won't just bamboozle the new contributor who just needs a
clear set of rules to make their first patch fly in.

Thanks so much for reading and commenting.  Nothing would be worse than
having a contribution HOWTO that Samba developers hadn't even read.

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                       https://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team  https://samba.org
Samba Developer, Catalyst IT          
https://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba