On 20 February 2011 17:30, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
You aren't running trunk in production, right? Right?
And what's wrong with that?
One of the nice things about the MediaWiki development process is that our trunk generally *is* usable. Sure, every one in a while someone fails to test their code properly before committing and breaks something, but generally you can just report the regression on #mediawiki and it'll get fixed or reverted promptly.
Anyway, we really should encourage more people to run trunk. It's the only efficient way to catch bugs before we put out a tarball.
Warning: Grumpy rambling ahead :)
My experience is not so good. Problems creep up almost daily, and although they are usually reported within a day, fixing them can take longer. The tendency is that reverts are only the last action if the committer or someone else doesn't fix the problem in a timely manner. And it's been multiple times when I have had to prevent anybody from updating twn code because of the issues I've found while reviewing new commits (I still read almost all commits to core and extension used in twn or which I otherwise care). And it's not a rare sight that we have to downgrade to older version of code in twn. Sometimes even that is difficult, because it's hard to find a revision which works good enough.
Okay I might be overestimating the breakage a bit, but I do have the feeling that things have gotten worse recently (I have nothing to back this up). It may just be the merge of the resource loader and the instability that followed. But still, it's a regular sight that someone commits code that doesn't even compile, especially to i18n files where they forget a trailing comma.
Pre-commit review could help here. It could even reduce the number of commits by preventing the numerous follow-ups each commit gets. I'm not saying we should abandon the current scheme altogether, but I would love if there was someone I could show my diffs before committing. Currently I only do it for bigger things by pasting the diff somewhere and poking random people in IRC. And yes I commit broken code too :)
-Niklas