[ros-dev] Trunk. Development. Testing.

[Richard]

My Thoughts:

If code could possibly break trunk, even for a few hours, it should be 
branched.  The developer should work on that code, test it thoroughly, 
and ask others to test, once it's confirmed working, merge it back to 
trunk.  Simple enough.  The problem is many developers only halfway test 
that a given change works.  Or they switch tasks in the middle of 
implementing something, leaving it half unimplemented.

The issue with branching to begin with was the fact that we had 
38924384238 branches with XYZ feature that were incomplete, because 
developers left, got bored and lost interest, or otherwise.  Branching 
should be done on the short term.  Instead of doing an entire win32k 
rewrite in a branch, rewrite a given function at a time.  If you must 
rewrite several functions, do so in your local tree and only commit when 
things are working.  Better yet:  don't do large rewrites at all.

FYI the ROS isos on svn.reactos.org STILL fail to install properly on my 
vmware machine.  Formatting the virtual drive and attempting to install 
crashes setup, installing without formatting results in locking at the 
boot screen with just the little bar going, and booting the livecd also 
results in a lock on the boot screen.  These types of regressions should 
not exist.

Regards,
Richard Campbell


Aleksey Bragin wrote:
> 		Hello,
> I have thought long time before writing this email, and finally it's  
> time to write it...
> N.B. I don't intend to hurt or offense anyone in this email. And  
> there is not so much use from a project leader who only says "yes",  
> "good", "agreed".
>
>
> We all see ReactOS became quite a big thing. Big everywhere - source  
> code, goals, development time... I think one would wish every FOSS  
> project to gain that level and speed of development.
>
> If someone of you played Civ during youth, you certainly remember  
> that your cities can't grow, grow and grow without any efforts -  
> people become unhappy, city is ovecrowded, demanding sanitation and  
> special facilities in order to continue growth. If you don't provide  
> those needed facilities, the city is going to at least stop its  
> development, and usually goes into disorder due to unhappines.
>
> Similar thing happens in software development too. Once project  
> reached certain size (even in terms of SLOC), developers' "tools"  
> should be upgraded and enhanced.
>
>
> That's it for theory. Let's have a look at ReactOS, and more  
> specifically its trunk.
> I'm getting more and more complaints that trunk is unstable, remains  
> unstable, and most of the time doesn't even boot, and the time came  
> to actually solve this problem, once and for ever.
>
> As an example, I will show only one of common scenario:
> Some developer commits his code, which works for him on his, say,  
> qemu but doesn't work for another dev on his real hardware. That  
> developer continues to commit code, and in some time encounters that  
> dev whose machine doesn't boot reactos and he says: "hey,  
> you ...ng ...rd, you broke trunk!". I don't even dare to cite which  
> reply follows, because it would take a few pages to quote. The  
> developer who broke trunk starts to regress test, reverting revision  
> by revision, spending time to identify the regressed revision (this  
> may take a few days, and we don't have fulltime paid developers), and  
> then finally finds the bug, fixes and commits. By that time, another  
> developer commits code with a regression in other place, and trunk is  
> still unbootable. And blaming continues, flamewars start, who broke  
> what, instead of actually enjoying the development process.
>
> Pretty unproductive, yeah? And you, the reader, are definately  
> wondering - what is the solution?
> I answer: There are a few solutions, but as always I will list only a  
> few
>
> 1) "Wine"-method. There is one leader who decides what, how and when  
> to commit. He maintains the tree, he makes sure tree is in good  
> shape, he spends all of his time to do testing, merging, reverting,  
> remerging.
> It works really good for Wine. Will it work good for us? I am in  
> doubts, really.
> 2) Improving our current development system. That's the direction I  
> would like to use.
>
> Major and the first improvement needed is testing. Testing often,  
> testing early, automating testing, getting more people to test,  
> regress test and feed results back to developers.
> Buildbot was a step in this direction, but more steps are needed.
> If someone broke booting, a proper recognized complain would be  
> "Revision NNXXY regresses 3rd boot with a bugcheck code NN stack  
> trace attached". The sooner this information is available and  
> developer is notified - the faster this bug will be solved.
> If developer is inaccessible within a long period of time, a decision  
> to revert this revision might be taken (that should be a really rare  
> case).
>
> This shouldn't come to absurd of course, I can tolerate having trunk  
> broken for a few hours certainly, when developer is working on a  
> certain feature, and, well, of course he may mistake, not fully  
> commit something and so forth.
> But having it half-broken for 2 weeks AND noone took time to regress  
> test and find the guilty revision.
>
> Or yet another example, fortunately last for this email. I  
> implemented an "alpha" version of usb mouse driver, along with that  
> recently incorporated NT4 compatible usb driver. And assumed, and  
> even asked in irc to test it - it's not that hard, but gives me a  
> chance to fix not-so-obvious issues before it'll be enabled by  
> default in trunk and will drive people crazy with some regress which  
> I didn't see on my machine, and, at last, even hearing "yay, your usb  
> mouse driver works!" just simply motivates me to finish e.g. a usb  
> keyboard driver, find and fix bugs, etc.
>
>
> Conclusions.
> 1) To improve development quality we must improve testing. Automate,  
> gather bigger testing team, etc.
> 2) Developers must be way more careful during commit. Just remember a  
> simple rule: Trunk is not a wastebin where you dump code to. It's  
> quite the opposite.
>
>
> Feedback.
> Your feedback is greatly encouraged and awaited. Feel free to discuss  
> this in this ML.
>
>
> With the best regards,
> Aleksey Bragin
> ReactOS Project Coordinator
>
>
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