[Freeipa-devel] Feature branches for sub-team efforts

[Alexander Bokovoy]

On ke, 12 loka 2016, David Kupka wrote:
>On 11/10/16 16:27, Alexander Bokovoy wrote:
>>On ti, 11 loka 2016, Petr Vobornik wrote:
>>>On 10/11/2016 03:50 PM, Alexander Bokovoy wrote:
>>>>On ti, 11 loka 2016, Petr Vobornik wrote:
>>>>>Hi List,
>>>>>
>>>>>we discussed locally a proposal about creating a feature branch for
>>>>>each
>>>>>sub-team effort in our main git. Currently it would be for the 4
>>>>>ongoing
>>>>>refactoring efforts + Simo's work
>>>>>
>>>>>Why?
>>>>>It will allow each developer to create a pull request against the
>>>>>feature branch and thus it will enable iterative development by
>>>>>multiple
>>>>>devs without affecting other sub-teams. When the
>>>>>feature(refactoring) is
>>>>>finished, the branch would be rebased on master and merged there. Note:
>>>>>rebases can be done as needed - e.g. when other subteam finishes its
>>>>>work.
>>>>>
>>>>>Concerns:
>>>>>1. Upstream git repo would be full of such branches.
>>>>>- This can be mitigated by deleting the feature branches when their are
>>>>>released or merged(up to discussion)
>>>>Don't put them in the upstream git repo. Let people decide where they
>>>>want to have them -- all Fedora contributors have access to
>>>>fedorapeople.org git hosting and there is github one button click
>>>>('Clone') away from the github mirror.
>>>>
>>>>It is not a problem to keep a separate git branch published this way.
>>>>
>>>
>>>It is not a matter of making the code public. That can be done easily as
>>>you write. Other alternative is own branch in GitHub fork.
>>>
>>>>May be I misunderstand you -- if you just want people to propose merge
>>>>requests on github with pre-defined names, then that's just fine.
>>>>
>>>
>>>Basically it's all about review.
>>>
>>>Example use case: More than 1 devs are working on a same big effort.
>>>This effort will probably consists of 10s of commits. The big effort is
>>>divided into smaller ones which can be implemented and reviewed
>>>separately. In our previous mode, the sub task would be merged to master
>>>it is reviewed and ACKed. But now we cannot do that. We want to merge
>>>the whole big task at once when it is finishes and tested.
>>>
>>>One dev could probably have a branch on personal fork of FreeIPA on
>>>GitHub which would work as the feature branch. Other team members would
>>>create pull requests against it.
>>>
>>>In such case we would loose mail notifications and would have to extend
>>>our tooling because ipatool can use only one upstream on push.
>>So I still think this is not a problem. If people can agree which git
>>repo clone will be primary one and submit merge requests against it,
>>then there is no problem in having that git repo's branch to be
>>submitted as the pull request against the main git repo. This way you'll
>>get all the changes seen at the pull request sync time.
>>
>
>From my POV, when we create the refactoring branches in upstream we 
>get this for free:
>* our minimal but convenient CI (lint + build on each PR)
>* mail notifications
>* tooling (ipatool pr-push XYZ -b refactoring-xyz just works)
>
>When creating them elsewhere we get:
>* confusion (no team-wide notifications, each effort in other fork)
>* manual rebasing and pushing
This is rehashing of what Petr wrote already. And I understand the
benefits of it. However, I don't like one part of the proposal: removing
branches from upstream when feature is merged. This is heavily against
accountability -- we should never remove anything from the primary git
tree. Also, this churn of branches creates a lot of issues in terms of
maintaining internal git datastore as you'll need to clean it from time
to time.

At this point I don't really see how benefits could outweigh the
negatives in the longer term. Thousands of projects are working with
separate git trees and do pull requests without negative of having to
keep all the temporary feature branches in the main git tree. Why can't
we?

>
>So I think it's best to create the branches in upstream repo. I don't 
>care about names and also I don't care what happens with them after 
>the effort is done.
>
>-- 
>David Kupka

-- 
/ Alexander Bokovoy