[webkit-dev] Please avoid rolling out patches speculatively and reland them ASAP if you had to

[Peter Kasting]

On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 1:19 PM, Emil A Eklund <eae at chromium.org> wrote:

> > I don't understand your logic.  A patch landed, the sheriff thinks maybe
> it
> > was bad and rolls it out, then it turns out it was a red herring.  Why
> is it
> > not now the sheriff's responsibility to re-land?  After all, the patch
> was
> > landed originally by people who understood it and hasn't been seen to
> cause
> > any problems.
>
> There might very well have been other changes that conflicts with it.
> If it applies cleanly then I agree with you that whoever rolled it out
> should reland it. If there are conflicts or if it requires merging in
> any way though I'd argue that the original author needs to get
> involved.
>

There are certainly cases where the original author needs to be involved,
but I'd be happy just saying this is a judgment call.  Usually rollouts
happen not long after a patch lands, and roll-ins happen not long after
that.  In those cases, most merge failures are trivial and mechanical and
can easily be handled by a conscientious sheriff who reads the relevant
changes involved in the conflicts.  Sometimes, of course, that's not true.
 But sheriffs should be biased towards "try to leave working patches in the
tree".

PK
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