I want to reaffirm my support for having what Nathan has now referred to as a "maintainer."  I don't see a way of upholding procedural complexity without the intervention of an officially designated human being.  Who is for/against this?

On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 2:17 AM, Matthew Turk <matthewturk@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Britton,

I think there are a few ways to address this.

One would be to encourage developers to do all their day-to-day work on stable.  Another would be for all bugfix PRs to get automatically grafted (and squashed) onto the stable branch or the yt branch.

One thing we also have fallen away from, which we had for a while, was the very rigorous and regular release schedule...

On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 8:46 AM, Britton Smith <brittonsmith@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Nathan,

This is a good discussion to be having and I definitely agree that bugfixes need to be making their way to the stable branch in real time.  The added complication in procedure does worry me, specifically for someone whose first ever PR is to fix a bug they find, but I imagine even experienced developers are going to have trouble remembering.

I think this might go a lot more smoothly if we had someone officially designated for this duty, their job being to immediately push bugfixes to/from stable.  If we had that, then we could continue to have all PRs go into the development branch.  What do people think about this?  If it were a rotating position, changing hands after releases, it might work.

Britton

On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 10:02 AM, Suoqing JI <suoqing@physics.ucsb.edu> wrote:

Hi,

I agree to the suggestion that the bugfix should also go into the stable branch.

as soon as a bugfix pull request to stable goes in, there should be an accompanying merge from the stable branch into the yt branch to ensure that both branches get bug fixes.

This is one possible way of doing it, so we can avoid the potential “mixing” of the new features in yt branch into the stable branch: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7165989/mercurial-apply-a-bugfix-change-from-stable-named-branch-to-dev-branch

Best wishes,

--

Suoqing JI

Ph.D Student

Department of Physics

University of California, Santa Barbara

CA 93106, USA

On Jan 13, 2015, at 3:44 PM, Nathan Goldbaum <nathan12343@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

Now that yt 3.1 is making its way out the door, I'd like to come back to a discussion we had last year about bugfixes.

I've made a pull request to the YTEP repository that summarized the change I'm proposing:

https://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/ytep/pull-request/48/modify-ytep-1776-to-require-that-bugfixes/diff

Basically, I think bugfixes need to go to the stable branch rather than the yt branch.  Currently, all new changes go to the yt branch.  While this does simplify our development practices, this makes it difficult for us to release new versions that only include fixes for bugs.  Instead, even minor version releases that are cut from the yt branch include new features and API breakages.

I think this approach violates the principle of least surprise for users who have download a bugfix release.

The solution, I think, is to ensure bugfixes are only applied to the stable branch.  This will ensure that we can straightforwardly do bugfix releases that inlude only bugfixes and that new features and API changes are isolated to the more "experimental" yt branch.

This does come with some possible down sides.  In particular, there will likely be some confusion as we switch our development practices.  In addition, new contributors may find it difficult to split pull requests into new features that should go to the yt branch and bugfixes that should go to the stable branch.  It also adds a new maintenance burden: as soon as a bugfix pull request to stable goes in, there should be an accompanying merge from the stable branch into the yt branch to ensure that both branches get bugfixes.  This gets more complicated if the bugfix looks different in the yt branch and the stable branch.

All that said, I think these new maintenance burdens can be overcome with a bit of vigilance and maybe some new tooling.

I've probably said enough about this.  What do you all think?  Comments and concerns are very welcome.

Best,

Nathan Goldbaum

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