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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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