[python-committers] PQM?

[Barry Warsaw]

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On Aug 14, 2008, at 5:27 AM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

>
>> It would be a change in culture for us, that's for sure. The question
>> becomes whether the drop in patch throughput is justified by an
>> increase of patch quality and stability in the code?
>
> Well, let's take the multiprocessing example. The question is:
> - would an a priori review have been able to uncover the most subtle  
> bugs?
> - would someone have done that review at all, and how long would it  
> have
> taken before it had been done?
> - if we had delayed the inclusion of multiprocessing in the mainline,
> doesn't it mean it would have got almost no testing since people are
> unlikely to test specific branches rather than the "official trunk"?
> - isn't the inclusion of multiprocessing itself, even if subtle bugs
> remain, an increase of quality since it gives people a standard and  
> rather
> good package for doing parallel stuff, rather than baking their own
> defective ad-hoc solutions?
>
> The thing I want to point out in the latter item is that measuring  
> quality
> solely by the number of bugs or the stability of a bunch of  
> buildbots is
> wrong (although of course fixing bugs and having green buildbots *is*
> important). Sometimes committing an imperfect patch can be better than
> committing nothing at all.

I think this is a case where PQM might have helped.  Assuming the  
build/test would uncover these subtle bugs, the multiprocessing code  
would not have landed.  You would then probably publish a branch with  
those (failing) changes and rally the help you needed to fix those  
problems.  Then you'd try to land it again.

The workflow would have likely been very similar to what happened for  
this code, except that it would be happening on a branch, not on the  
mainline.  Maybe no one would have been motivated enough to get them  
working if they weren't breaking mainline.  The tradeoff is  
instability in the mainline and uncertainty as to whether the mainline  
is of high enough quality to release.

- -Barry

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