Hi,
For the last months, we have seen a huge increase in people working on the
FlexJS and people working on first applications using FlexJS. I think we should
discuss how we can make sure we don’t have interruptions like the current one
in the future.
One point that has been causing pain in the past, was that some people are
using Ant and some are using Maven. Maven is quite a bit more restrictive than
Ant and it builds a lot more and tests a lot more. Just as an example in
contrast to the Ant build the Maven build builds all Examples and it also tests
some of them to be runnable in a browser. The Ant build only builds the
framework and most of the latest problems only pop up if you build an
application. It has occurred several times that Changed failed the Maven build
but didn’t fail the Ant build … just because the Ant build doesn’t build
everything. We could avoid this problem if people would not simply ignore build
failures reported by the ASF Jenkins, which is taking care of the Maven build.
It is currently setup to give feedback within an hour or so.
Sometimes the “fix” was to exclude a module in Maven. This usually had the
side-effect of the RAT plugin failing after that because it now finds files
without Apache headers. A quick solution to that problem is to log-in to the
ASF Jenkins and to click on “wipe workspace” of that build. After that this
type of problem should go away immediately.
Another point was that sometimes people work together on a larger refactoring
and check-in stuff to develop in order to share code. We should start using
feature branches for this. This has currently not been happening at all. I have
setup everything that if you create a branch IN ALL 3 REPOS with a name
“feature/{somename}” (but the same “somename” in all three ;-) ) the ASF
Jenkins will setup a Job for that which builds all parts in one go and give you
immediate feedback on the state of your branch. Feature branches that are not
“blue” should not be merged back to develop.
One last pattern I have encountered was people reporting stuff like: “I have
been working on X and have almost finished ... I know it will break Y, but I’ll
push my changes and fix Y after that” … keep in mind: By breaking Y everyone
working on FlexJS is forced to stop working so I will probably veto every
suggestion I encounter on the list that has a similar pattern.
FlexJS has matured and we are approaching a 1.0, but we also must mature the
way we develop or we will hurt early adopters and people willing to help get
FlexJS to shape. We want enterprise users to use our stuff, then we must start
working in an enterprise-acceptable way.
Keep up the awesome work and lets just get a little more awesome ;-)
Chris
