[webkit-dev] Yet another bug-less change hosed the tree.

[Adam Barth]

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 1:23 PM, Geoffrey Garen <ggaren at apple.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 12:56 PM, Eric Seidel <eric at webkit.org> wrote:
>> I thought it was generally good practice to have bug.webkit.org bugs
>> with changes?
>
> I wasn't aware of that.
>
> What value would a bug report add in a situation
> like http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/59086?

Having a bug serves a couple useful purposes:

1) Your patch can be reviewed by other members of the project who
aren't sitting next to you on couch.
2) Your patch can be vetted by the various bots that analyze patches
posted for review.
3) The but serves as a coordination point for dealing with bustage
caused by a patch and for regressions detected later.

> Personally, I'd prefer it if we kept the TPS reports in our project to a
> minimum. In this case, a TPS report would have been more typing than the
> patch itself.

That's part of what motivated us to create webkit-patch, which makes
creating and managing bugs and patches quite easy.

I don't think we need a bug report for every patch.  For example,
correcting a typo in a ChangeLog or fixing a build failure don't seem
to require their own bug report.

What Eric is too polite to say is that some of the earlier patches he
refers to appear to have been landed without even compiling them
locally.  With a bug report, these failure are obvious in advance
because the EWS bots complain.  When you go cowboy and commit without
building and testing, you impose costs on everyone else in the
project.  As the project scales, these costs become larger than the
amount of time you personally save and are a net lose for the project.

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 1:30 PM, Peter Kasting <pkasting at google.com> wrote:
> I agree that a 1:1 association between patches and bugs (which has been
> suggested to me in the past, thus mentioning it here) seems like a mistake.

Your email appears to be discussing having more than one patch
associated with a given bug report.  That seems like a different topic
than Eric's email, which was about a patch with no bug at all.

Adam