On Jul 13, 2009, at 11:57 AM, David Hyatt wrote:
On Jul 13, 2009, at 1:52 PM, Jeremy Orlow wrote:
On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 11:40 AM, David Hyatt <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Jul 13, 2009, at 12:52 PM, Peter Kasting wrote:
On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 10:47 AM, David Hyatt <[email protected]>
wrote:
I agree. We should formalize this as policy too in my opinion.
Maybe something time-based, e.g., if you have an implementation of
a new Web technology that is going to take > (1month?) to
implement, then the feature should be landed inside ENABLE ifdefs
(that can then be removed when the feature is sufficiently far
along).
For Chromium this kind of time frame can be problematic, since
there's pretty much no guarantee of when a WebKit trunk build
could be shipped as (eventually) a stable Chromium/Google Chrome
release. Even having an incomplete feature in the tree a few days
can result in the incomplete feature getting shipped to web authors.
The way to ship "ToT" (in my opinion) is to cut a branch, watch ToT
for any regressions from recent work, merge those fixes into the
branch, and then turn off anything that is "in-progress" on the
branch. Expecting ToT to actually be shippable all the time is not
very practical. Realistically people will always be causing
occasional regressions from bug fixes and feature work. Branches
are the way to stabilize from some known point.
I agree, but I also agree with Peter's heuristic for when things
should be behind a flag. Regressions can always happen, but if
you're knowingly introducing something that's half-baked it really
seems like it should be behind a flag.
I agree with that. I'm just asserting that some reasonable time
limit before requiring ifdefs is ok. If a feature only takes 1-2
weeks to land, I think it's total overkill to put it inside an
ifdef. Any cut branch should take long enough to stabilize that it
could merge the rest of the feature in anyway. If you're ever
cutting a branch off ToT and shipping it as a full-blown release
with less than 2 weeks turnaround, you're doing it wrong in my
opinion.
I'm more or less with Hyatt on this one. I think it would be process
overkill to require ifdef for every feature that has more than one
implementation step. A month sounds like about the right time scale
where a switch is useful. One other thing to keep in mind: sometimes
an incomplete implementation of a feature may still be a state that's
useful to ship. I'm hoping people can exercise good judgment here and
ping the list when in doubt.
Regards,
Maciej
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