[january-dev] overly restrictive restrictions on merging

[Jonah Graham <jonah@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi folks,

I have been trying the current settings where we are quite restrictive
on allowing commits to be merged. Current PRs must:
- pass IP validation
- pass travis build.
- be up to date with master

However with all of these checks on together we end up with a perfect
storm when more than one person is trying to work on January at the
same time.

- The IP validation process does not deal with noreply@xxxxxxxxxx, but
we are allowed to merge such commits, see
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=496885. This means if
you press the "Update Branch" button, you have made your PR
unmergable. The only way out is to rebase your changes. Additionally
as we rebase changes on to master, these noreply commits are dropped
anyway.

- The travis build can sometimes take hours to run, depending on other
activity at eclipse.
https://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/cross-project-issues-dev/msg14309.html.

- Unrelated commits are effectively being treated as conflicts because
of requirement to be up to date with master. Therefore if 2 people are
working on unrelated code, they are constantly having to update to
each other.

- If someone else (e.g. a committer) presses Update Branch, it
actually modifies the submitter's git repo.

Therefore I propose that we remove the restriction on committers
merging and leave it up to committer responsibility to review
submissions.

Any objections?

Jonah

~~~
Jonah Graham
Kichwa Coders Ltd.
www.kichwacoders.com