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Re: [stellation-res] Proposal: audited checkins 
+1

We really need do what we can to keep the codebase stable, at least until we
have a solid release and can start self-hosting again.

- Jim

At 01:40 PM 1/22/2003, Mark C. Chu-Carroll wrote:



Since we're getting very close to the point where we start self-hosting,
it's getting increasingly important to be really careful about
handling changes, and making sure that the system is stable.

I did some chatting with an IBMer who's a serious contributor to
Mozilla about how they handle changes, as well as looking at
a lot of literature and talking to various development folks. One
of the things that seems to come up again and again as a quality
management technique is audited checkins.

What this means is that each change to the system must be seen
by *two* people before it gets checked in: the person who make the
change, and a second person who looked over the change before allowing
it to be checked in.

The Mozilla process for this is based on Bugzilla. They require *all*
work to be entered into bugzilla tasks. When the work is completed, the
person who did it puts a patch containing the change into the bugzilla
task, and transfers the task to another developer. The other developer
applies the patch to a clean space, and checks it. If they approve it,
they check in the change; otherwise, they throw the bugzilla task back
to the developer with a description of the problem.

It's somewhat cumbersome, but not too bad, since Eclipse has patch
generation and patch processing support.

When we start self-hosting, a more stellation-appropriate version of
this emerges: you check changes in to your own branch; then have another
developer verify those changes, and do the actual checkin to the
main branch. In fact, we can even set up the privileges so that anyone
who wants to can create a personal branch where they can check in; but
only the official committers have permission to check those changes into
the main branch.

I'd like to propose adopting this process, at least for a short
time. I think it will help us get better stability as we start
self-hosting and prepping for the release. If it works well, we can
adopt the Stellation-specific variant of it it as a longer term
process; if not, we can just abandon it.

Opinions? Comments? Rotten tomatoes thrown at my head?

        -Mark

--
Mark Craig Chu-Carroll,  IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
*** The Stellation project: Advanced SCM for Collaboration
***             http://www.eclipse.org/stellation
*** Work: mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/Home: markcc@xxxxxxxxxxx


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--
Jim Wright, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
*** The Stellation project: Advanced SCM for Collaboration
*** http://www.eclipse.org/stellation
*** Work Email: jwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx ------- Personal Email: jim.wright@xxxxxxx

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