[webkit-dev] The tree is on fire: a tragedy of the commons

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Feb 26, 2010, at 11:34 AM, Geoffrey Garen wrote:

>> There is a non-trivial cost of this workflow on the rest of the team.
>> -keeps the commit-queue from running
>> -often results in new test failures going unnoticed because the  
>> tree is already red
>> -we can't generally trust that all the tests should pass locally
>
> I think all of the costs you list fundamentally derive from  
> "failures going unnoticed." That's the rationale for my suggestion  
> that we start by making sure that failures are noticed.

I strongly agree with Geoff that our first step should be to make  
failures more visible.

> But if we had a good system for making failures noticed, and a  
> working EWS, and we still had problems with a red tree, I'm sure I  
> would support some further action to solve the problem.

I agree with this as well.

One goal I have always had for the WebKit project is to have the  
minimum amount of policy necessary for the project to run smoothly. It  
seems good to me that we have less in the way of rules and bureaucracy  
than other open source projects of a similar scale. As the project  
grows, we will certainly need some additional policy. But I would  
prefer to take it in steps. It seems to me like making failures more  
visible would go a long way.


Regards,
Maciej