On 12/18/2017 05:24 AM, Jędrzej Nowacki wrote:
On czwartek, 7 grudnia 2017 12:17:16 CET Adam Treat wrote:
Hi,

I think it is high time that we fix the underlying problem: supporting
atomic commits across submodules.
As I'm not against the idea, I'm not really fan of it either. The problem with
atomic commits across submodules is that they encourage API breakages. Without
supporting both code paths even for a little while, one is not aware of the
pain that our users needs to go through every time we break API.

So your position is we shouldn't need atomic commits across submodules because the changes that are leading to breakage are themselves the problem. Let's examine types of changes:

1) Build system changes that require cross-module modifications
2) New public API in base module where dependent module takes advantage of it
3) Private API being changed out from under
4) Merges of the above 3 types from release branches to dev

Of these, only #2 should be solvable without atomic commits. In that case, we can introduce API first and when it is integrated, only then update dependent modules. This is still a problem for #4 though, but more about that later.

For the other types, atomic commits are at least sometimes going to be required. Right now, we are experiencing breakage. And it *is* painful. But I have not seen a postmortem of said breakages that shows the current processes are up to preventing such breakage. Maybe the answer is to move away from private API and a build system that does not need to be bootstrapped from Qt...

Now, back to #4, I do know that those responsible for merging from release branches into dev face a mind field of cross-module modifications. Consider #2 again and say such a change across modules has made it into release branches. It is my understanding that it is *just such a set of changes* that led to Liang Qi's request to add labels to API changes because the ordering info gets lost.  Merges from release to dev are going to be problematic until we have some way of ensuring cross-module dependencies are handled.

Which is why I propose that we stop merging from release to dev and require all changes to hit dev first. But, more on that in another email thread later. Maybe after the holidays ;)

Once this is done we should revert our CI to test changes against latest
version of all modules.
No. First, how these two are connected, that is a big jump to a solution,
without providing reasoning. I know that you didn't know about the fact that
we pin submodules in qt5 and you got burned by this. That __is__ an argument,
but an alternative solution would be a better documentation or UI.  Second,
the most important, that doesn't scale. By compiling against latest Qt5 we
reduced CI load by ~80%.

Fair enough, let's table this. I have more to say about this, but it really is related to my suggestion above. Again, more about that later.
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