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********
Workflow
********
People want to manage submissions of patches; see `Havoc's post`__.
__ http://log.ometer.com/2004-11.html#19
The ideal interface is::
baz branch http://project.org/bzr/project-2.0
[hackety hack]
baz submit
It would be nice if people could submit simple changes without needing
to set up their own public branches. I don't think people will want
to allow random strangers to create branches on their machine, so this
probably means submitting the changes by email. To form such a patch
we need to know what branch point counts as "upstream", and who to
send the patches to. As a reasonable default, we might use the last
time we branched and the last
Some of this should be better done in integration with e.g. mail
clients or external robots or bug trackers.
Bazaar-NG allows redrafting rejected patches in an interesting way:
Person writes a feature on a new feature branch. They can commit
several times, merge up to date, even have sub-forks to an arbitrary
extent. When they're ready, they submit their changes to the
maintainer, either by mailing the diffs relative to the main branch,
or by the maintainer pulling from their tree. If they don't like
it, they can not commit it to their tree, and hopefully give some
feedback to the contributor. (I don't think that feedback needs to
go back through the tool; email or some other communication
mechanism is probably fine.) The contributor can then keep working
in their branch, until it eventually gets merged.
Alternatively, the maintainer might want to merge the change but fix
it up themselves. We keep track of the fact that it was merged, and
the maintainer can make arbitrary fixups either in the course of
merging it or afterwards. When the contributor later merges back
everything will work.
Another case is that the maintainer wants to improve the patch but
not take it into their main tree. What they can do here is take it
into a separate feature branch, fix it up, and then ask the
contributor to merge back from there.
Maintainers__ would also like to keep track of patches that have been
submitted but not yet accepted, so they're not lost and can be
updated. One way to do this would be to create a branch on the
maintainer's machine for a submitted patch, and apply the submission
to that. The maintainer can fix it if they want, or take updates to
it. The submitter can see what, if anything, was done. Because this
branch is identified by a URL it can be cited in bug reports, and it
might make sense to name the branch by the bug it is supposed to fix.
__ http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2002-12/msg00444.html
Aegis-style review and integration
----------------------------------
Some projects might want all changes to be submitted for review before
merging onto the mainline. This might be done either by convention,
or perhaps by not allowing individual developers to merge to the
mainline but rather having specific privileged integrators.
Aegis_ enforces a lot of workflow/process; it would be good to be able
to do something similar on top of bazaar-ng either manually or as a
higher-level tool. Aegis's model is that each proposed change is
essentially on a branch that later merges into the mainline, which
makes a lot of sense.
.. _Aegis: compared-aegis.html
To do something like Aegis, follow this process:
* Developer makes a new branch from the trunk to develop a feature,
called say ``project--devel--bug-123``.
* When they have almost finished development, they re-merge from the
trunk to make sure they're up to date.
* By some mechanism they ask a reviewer to consider their changes --
perhaps by sending email, or using a bug tracking system, or
something else. They tell the reviewer the location of their
branch, which might be on an HTTP server for a public project, or on
a directory on a shared server.
* The reviewer makes a new branch for review based off the trunk,
``project--review--bug-123``, and merges the development branch into
it. The merge should be perfect if the developer was up to date
with the trunk. If the merge fails they can either bounce it back
to the developer or fix the merge themselves according to local
policy or their own discretion. They then review, build and test
the branch. If it's OK, they commit to their review branch and send
a note asking for it to be integrated (or perhaps they integrate
themselves.)
* The integrator merges from the review branch onto the trunk,
builds/tests and commits. Since they pull from the reviewer's
branch there is no way unreviewed changes can sneak through even if
the developer adds to their work branch after the review.
This can be done by a robot, or by a reviewer.
* The developer can look at the review, integration and trunk branches
to see that their changes have merged.
This model is practiced by some people at Canonical using tla. Since
people work within a complex configspec, they like very much to be
able to branch in-place so that they do not need to rebuild the whole
config to start new development. (Though perhaps the real fix is to
make assembling a config simpler...)
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