Am 29.04.2017 um 02:35 schrieb Lex Trotman:
On 29 April 2017 at 09:55, Matthew Brush mbrush@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:
- 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.