[Geany-Devel] Helping Geany move forward: testing

[Thomas Martitz]

Am 29.04.2017 um 02:35 schrieb Lex Trotman:
> On 29 April 2017 at 09:55, Matthew Brush <mbrush at codebrainz.ca> wrote:
>> On 2017-04-28 02:35 PM, Thomas Martitz wrote:
>>> Am 27.04.2017 um 22:51 schrieb Vasiliy Faronov:
>>>> Hi all,
>>>>
>>>>   From discussions elsewhere, such as [1], it sounds like one of the
>>>> things holding back Geany development right now is a need for more
>>>> testing.
>>>
>>> Helping to test PRs is truly needed, and much appreciated.
>>>
>>> However, I do think that Geany lacks also actual developers that cna
>>> merge stuff. I feel the current team is afraid of merging non-trivial
>>> changes, leaving even semi-complex patches to Colomban. Unfortunately
>>> Colomban has little time these days, too, so we're kind of stuck. There
>>> are lots of PRs that have recent activity from the authors and are
>>> tested appropriately but still don't get attention from developers.
>>>
>> My general problem is that we don't have a unstable/development branch per
>> se, nor proper automated testing, and I don't want to break master so I
>> won't merge a single thing without testing it thoroughly myself. This can
>> turn a 5-10 minute merge into a several hours or more testing session,
>> requiring special setups and re-compiling Geany on 3 different OSes, etc.
> I have to agree with Matthew that:
>
> 1. Nobody wants to break master because its what everybody is using.
> Problem is that if we had a development branch nobody would be using
> it because it might break, so its insufficiently tested.  I don't have
> a solution to that.

master *is* the development branch. It's not a stable branch that must 
not be broken at all costs. It's also not true that everyone is using 
master. The vast majority is using releases, and in fact we do regular 
releases so that we can use master as a true development branch. Even I 
don't use master (a very regular contributor) for my clone that I use 
daily. I always fork the last release, merge my changes, and backport 
individual commits from master (via cherry-pick). Of course I develop 
features based on master, so I do test the master branch on a regular basis.

So yes, if you are afraid of doing development on the development 
branch, it's clear that we're struggling to get anything done. Sure, one 
can expect that PRs are perfect before getting merged, but the current 
situation shows that this is not working if you want to get something 
done in a timely manner.

 From another angle, both of you could easily create a development 
branch. But you didn't so far. Anyway, how is that workflow supposed to 
work? If lots of PRs go through an intermediate branch then merging that 
intermediate branch into master is going to be a nightmare too.

Best regards.