Next focus: PROCESS

[Brad Anderson]

On Monday, 10 December 2012 at 23:41:25 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> Hello all,
>
>
> Walter and I have had a long discussion following his trip to 
> Australia. Following the current sprint for Win64 (which we 
> all, I think, agree was long overdue and had to be done), the 
> main area we need to work on (as I'm sure many would agree) is 
> improving our process, in particular the approach to releasing 
> the compiler and standard library.
>
> Walter has delegated me to lead this effort, and agreed to obey 
> with whatever process comes forward as long as it's reasonably 
> clear and simple.
>
> In turn, I'll be collecting thoughts and opinions in this 
> thread, distilled from previous discussions. We should develop 
> a few simple git scripts (such as git-start-new-feature or 
> git-start-bugfix etc) supported by an equally simple piece of 
> documentation describing how to start a new release, fix a bug, 
> experiment with a new feature, and such.
>
> (One piece that has been brought forward is 
> http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/ - 
> something to keep in mind.)
>

As someone who uses the git workflow described in this link every 
single day let me say I'm a big fan.  It's so well documented 
(and widely used) that it should be pretty easy for everyone to 
adopt and it provides a lot of real benefits to a project.  From 
the look of it most contributors already use feature branches for 
their pull requests so this should be a pretty simple transition.

> Please chime in with ideas and thoughts.
>
>

I like the idea of having a release manager (that changes to 
whoever volunteers for each release). It'll take some of the 
release time pressure off of Walter (at least for the times he 
isn't the release manager) and raise D's bus factor (which is 
very close to being above 1 these days) as the release process is 
documented and shared among several individuals.  I imagine the 
role of release manager being fairly laid back though (it is a 
volunteer job still).  Their responsibilities would be rolling 
the betas and actual releases and just being the point-man who 
goes through and makes sure all the pull requests that are ready 
to merge are merged and last minute regressions are acknowledged.

BA