[webkit-qt] Question about the release process

[Ademar Reis]

On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 12:19 PM, Ademar Reis <ademar.reis at openbossa.org> wrote:
> On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 11:12 AM, Antonio Gomes <tonikitoo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi.
>>
>> Why bugs keep being added and removed from the meta bugs "blocking/depends
>> on" list? It makes bugzilla too spammy, and does not make any sense to me:
>> If it is FIXED, it will be marked (even visually) as such on the meta
>> blocker list, so why doubling the number of bugemails we get by removing it
>> from the meta bug blocking list?
>>
>> For all other projects I've working on (including Mozilla and QtWebKit in
>> the past) the meta bugs were common, but such a practice was not happening.
>> but now it is.
>>
>> Maybe there is a good reason of course, but if it is noising  more for
>> everybody than helping a small group, it should be reconsidered?
>>
>
> Hi Antonio.
>
> That's a recurrent question and an interesting discussion. I myself
> asked this same very question on the first day Simon explained the
> system to me. On these days, when I'm very active cherry-picking
> stuff, these e-mails start to bother everybody and someone always
> complains. :-)
>
> I'm sure there are some ways to improve the system and I'll propose a
> couple of them at the end, but in summary:
>
> Please note that the question: "which bugs are currently blocking the
> release?" is the most important question in terms of
> release-management (not just to me, but to all developers involved,
> managers, Q&A, etc). On traditional open source projects, that would
> be made by querying for OPEN bugs blocking the release meta-bug.
>
> But on webkit we don't track bugs on QtWebKit versions, we track bugs
> on trunk. That is: whenever a bug is FIXED, it's FIXED on trunk.
> There's no proper way to say: "this bug has been fixed on
> qtwebkit-2.2" and/or "this has been fixed on qtwebkit-2.1". So we need
> a hack. The current hack is: "if the bug blocks the 2.2 meta-bug, it
> has not been fixed there yet". Ditto for 2.1, 2.0 and for "bugs fixed
> in some release but pending trunk inclusion" (bug #32653). Corollary:
> there's no clean way to open a bug that affects only a particular
> release of QtWebKit (but that's a different problem that usually
> doesn't give us much trouble).
>
> So let's look at some alternatives or ways to mitigate the problem:
> (please note that the process is fully automated these days using
> qtwebkit-tools / webkitpy, so there will be a cost in implementing any
> of these changes)
>
> 1. I think one of the problems is that the current script does two
> actions on each blocking bug: a) add the comment about the cherry-pick
> and b) remove the bug from the blockers list. That triggers two
> e-mails. The script could be smarter and do both actions together (not
> currently supported by webkitpy, AFAIK).
>

Done. :-)

Now you should get one single e-mail when your bug fix is
cherry-picked, as both changes are committed together (the comment
addition and the bug removal from the blocking list).

Naturally, if you watch the meta-bug as well, you'll get an additional
e-mail showing that your bug has been removed from its blocking list.
There's nothing I can do about that (it's an informative e-mail for
everybody else, after all).

Thanks,
  - Ademar

-- 
Ademar de Souza Reis Jr. <ademar.reis at openbossa.org>
Nokia Institute of Technology