[dmd-internals] process / tool issues

[Steven Schveighoffer via dmd-internals]

> On Jun 6, 2017, at 6:48 PM, Brad Roberts via dmd-internals <dmd-internals at puremagic.com> wrote:
> 
> So, what's missing from the current tooling and processes that has allowed these two scenarios:
> 
> 1) 3 pull requests to master marked for auto-merge for weeks to not be merged:
> 
>    https://github.com/dlang/druntime/pull/1679 - 23 days
>        broken on continuous-integration/jenkins/pr-merge

It appears to have broken something in vibe.d

> 
>    https://github.com/dlang/druntime/pull/1732 - 30 days
>        broken on continuous-integration/jenkins/pr-merge

This one needs to be rebased. I had to do this to a PR from the hackathon that Sebastian told me to rebase, and it worked after the rebase.

> 
>    https://github.com/dlang/druntime/pull/1831 - 9 days
>        waiting on continuous-integration/jenkins/pr-merge

This one should have started testing by now, not sure.

> 
> 2) 7 pull requests to stable to sit for days/weeks/months?  Pulls to stable should definitionally be simple low risk changes.  The oldest one is from August 2016.
> 
> I'm starting this thread in hopes that improvements can be made. Minimal time should be spent on how we got to that state or if it's anyone's fault.

I think we need to seriously consider whether we should have the jenkins status required. There are too many dependencies, and I don’t even know if the build is redone properly if the dependent project has been updated and fixed a bug?

I understand the point, and I agree with the idea of it. But holding up progress with a test that hasn’t been completely fleshed out and clearly has bugs in it doesn’t help the situation.

I wonder if possibly some agent can email periodically this list of “stuck” PRs so we can pay attention. As I have mentioned before, the label being added isn’t sent in email, so it’s not obvious from just my email list that these things are supposed to be merged. I had no idea some of these were stuck for so long…

-Steve