On 2015-11-10, Scott Kostyshak wrote: > On Mon, Nov 09, 2015 at 11:19:16AM +0100, Vincent van Ravesteijn wrote:
>> >> So my preferred policy would be: >> if a >> >> commit is found to have broken a test, either the situation is resolved >> within >> >> a day (i.e. the bug is fixed or the test is fixed) or the commit is >> reverted >> >> (and perhaps pushed to a separate remote branch). >> > >> > A small remark: imposing a 1-day rule seems ad hoc to me. Do we even have >> such rules for compilation warnings? For compilation failures? For the >> latter, I imagine that people want it solved ASAP, but this arises more out >> of social pressure, not an ad hoc rule. > Social pressure does not work with everyone. Also, some people do not > understand why certain things are so frustrating to others. ... >> Yes, the 1-day rule might lead to frustrated developers and increases the >> noise in master branch even more. > OK. How about a 1 week rule then? Or you would prefer no rule and just > deal with it case-by-case and implicit rule as you mention below and as > Guillaume refers to? >> And yes of course there is an implicit rule that when your commit breaks >> something or has problems whatsoever you are expected to fix it within a >> reasonable timeframe. This is, what I prefer. Could we make this an explicit rule: When your commit breaks something or has problems whatsoever you are expected to fix it within a reasonable timeframe. If it is not possible to solve the problems, revert the commit or move it to a "feature branch" (remember, branching is dead easy with Git). "Reasonable" depends on the problems involved and may range from 1 day to some weeks. One problem with the current testing situation is, that many failing test are due to fixes that correct behaviour that was wrong before (like reporting missing characters in the output document as an error). Next, this led to discovery of the use of a wrong encoding with Xe/LuaTeX and TeX fonts - solving this brought more problems to light. I believe such "indirect" problems must be solved "collectively" - after a consensus whether to revert the "discovering" commit (and live with the old hidden bugs), temporarily invert affected tests or do some hacks to get a clean state, or have a concerted effort to solve the basic problems. Günter
