[webkit-dev] Rolling out a patch requires a justification beyond a test failure in downstream projects

[Ryosuke Niwa]

On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 7:20 PM, Elliott Sprehn <esprehn at chromium.org>wrote:

> Do you have an example of when this has occurred? It's good to have
> examples if we want to prevent this in the future.
>

Yes. I'd rather not publicly humiliate someone on webkit-dev so I'll send
you a bug URL in private.

In this particular incident, a WebKit patch was rolled out due to a
Chromium UI test failure. The person who rolled out the patch didn't
communicate any information on the original bug from which the patch was
landed. On the bug where the rollout was made, the person left links to
Chromium WebKit roll patches but without any information regarding tests
that failed. The only reason I could follow his comments is because I used
to work on Chromium. The patch was subsequently rolled out in less than 20
minutes from the time the person first provided any information about the
test failure at all.

To make it even worse, the roll out was speculative, and the patch was
found innocent of causing the failure. The person promised to re-land the
patch by Monday and never came back to the bug. (Now you know where my
previous email came from).

- R. Niwa
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/attachments/20121211/82335b8e/attachment-0001.html>