Hi Matt,

So I guess "multiple heads" even with multiple bookmarks is off the table now, if I read the rest of the thread correctly?  If so, can we figure out a way to allow experimental stuff into "yt" and then move most folks onto "stable"?

By my count, Nathan was relenting somewhat under the weight of my walls of text and Cameron was on board despite some concerns.  What are your thoughts on having multiple development heads?

Britton

On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 1:52 PM, Britton Smith <brittonsmith@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everyone,

I had some ideas for improving the yt development process that I

wanted to run by everyone.  This can be discussed further at our

upcoming team meeting and if people are in favor, I will issue a pull

request to the relevant YTEP.

STATEMENT OF PROBLEM

Currently, development proceeds roughly as follows.  The two main

active branches within the central yt repository are yt and stable.

The tip of stable is the latest release and the yt branch is the de

facto "development version" of the code.  Until recently, we have not

been very good at regularly scheduled minor releases and so the stable

branch sits for quite some time with many bugs that are fixed within

the development branch.  This effectively makes stable unusable and

pushes most users to the yt branch.

When new features are developed, pull requests are issued to the

single head of the yt branch.  Because this is the version most people

are actually using, the current policy is to not allow PR with new

functionality to be accepted until they are 100% ready (full

functionality, tests, docs, etc).  As we have already seen, this makes

collaborative development very cumbersome, as it requires people to

create forks of the fork from which the PR originates.  They then must

issue PRs to that fork after which time the original PR is updated.

The current volume render refactor is the perfect example of this.

PROPOSED SOLUTION

Before I lay out the proposed solution, I want to list a number of

recent developments that I think will make this possible:

1. Nathan's new script for backporting changes now keeps stable and yt

   synced on bugfixes.

2. We have returned to doing minor releases containing only bugfixes,

   thanks again to Nathan's hard work.  This and point 1 means that

   users are once again safe to be on stable, and now should be there

   most of the time.

3. Bitbucket now supports bookmarks, meaning that PRs can be issued to

   specific bookmarks instead of to branches or heads named only by the

   changeset hash.

4. The weekly PR triage hangouts are making it easier to process PRs

   and also providing a place to strategize getting larger PRs

   accepted.  Thanks to Hilary for keeping this going.

With the above in mind, I propose the following:

1. Create a "development" bookmark to sit at the tip of the yt

   branch.  All PRs containing relatively small new features are

   issued to this.  The requirements for acceptance remain the same:

   PRs accepted to "development" must contain all intended

   functionality and be fully documented.  This allows the

   "development" bookmark to be defined explicitly as everything that

   will be included in the next major release.

2. Large new features should have a corresponding YTEP that has been

   accepted.  After the YTEP has been accepted, a PR should be issued

   to the yt branch.  After some initial discussion, this PR is pulled

   into the main yt repo with a bookmark named after the feature.

   Once this has happened, developers can now issue new PRs

   specifically to this bookmark.  This is effectively what we have

   now with the volume render work in the "experimental" bookmark,

   only we would rename the bookmark to something like "vr-refactor".

   As with PRs issued directly to "development", only after the new

   feature is 100% ready shall it be merged into the "development"

   bookmark.

3. We continue to make use of the PR triage hangouts to establish when

   large features are ready to be merged.

I believe this will have the following benefits:

1. Large, new features can be developed collaboratively without the

   need for forks of forks of forks.

2. New, underdevelopment features are more accessible to the larger

   community by simply updating to named bookmarks from the main repo

   (no need for "just pull these changes from my fork").

3. The "development" branch is preserved as a place only for

   ready-to-be-released features (i.e., polished and documented).

All told, this is really just a small tweak on our current process.

Please comment with any thoughts, or even a +/-1 if your feelings can

be summed up thusly.

Britton

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