[webkit-dev] Please leave detailed information when you're rolling out patches

Ryosuke Niwa rniwa at webkit.org
Mon Apr 18 14:00:09 PDT 2011


Hi,

I've seen a few people rolling out patches without leaving
adequate explanations on the bugs. In my opinion, rolling out patches
without explaining the reason is actively harmful to the project because:

   - The author and the reviewer have no idea what caused the patch to be
   rolled out.
   - If build failure or test failure occurred on ports/platforms they don't
   normally work, then they have no clue what those failures were.

So when you're rolling out a patch, please leave the following information
on the original bug (not the one sheriff bot automatically creates):

   - Did builds fail?  If so, on which bots, ports, platforms were they and
   what were errors?
   - Did tests fail? If so, on which bots, ports, platforms were they and
   what were diffs / errors?

For example, "test was failing" can't be considered as
an adequate description because it doesn't tell us which tests failed on
which port and platform and what were diffs / errors.  It must be something
along the line of "test X Y Z were failing on port A platform B, and there's
the diff on A-B." (with an appropriate link to build bots' result pages).

Also, given the number of reviewers and distributions among different time
zones, it might make sense for us to require a review to roll out patches
someone else wrote (I think patch authors should be able to rollout their
patches at their discretion) since any reviewer can r+ rollout patches.

Best,
Ryosuke Niwa
Software Engineer
Google Inc.
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