Handling of compiler patches

[Adam Wilson]

On Thu, 21 Jun 2012 10:51:03 -0700, Dmitry Olshansky  
<dmitry.olsh at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 21-Jun-12 11:40, bearophile wrote:
>> For DMD in GitHub there are more than one hundred open pull requests
>> (currently 111). So far people have created more than one thousand
>> patches for DMD (currently 1022):
>>
>> https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pulls
>>
>> Among the list of open pull requests there are some bugs and enhancement
>> requests that I'd really like to see applied & fixed in not too much  
>> time.
>>
>> I am not a compiler writer, but I have two suggestions for Walter (or at
>> least to open a discussion, if the things I am saying are wrong):
>>
> Instead of pushing Walter to work some other way to improve his  
> bandwidth I'd suggest to implement proper caching first.
>
> What I suggest is to finally organize multi-stage development process  
> that loosely models military command chain :)
>
> OK. Walter is the general at HQ (@ dlang master branch) no doubt. And  
> some of core contributors are assigned as lieutenants for feature  
> oriented branches.
>
> The structure I imagine is:
>
> Walter (master branch)
>    |--- CTFE feature branch, Don Clugston
>    |--- Backend bugfix & feature branch, Brad Roberts
>    |--- Language bugfix & feature, Kenji Hara / Daniel Murphy
>    |--- Miscellaneous & ICE bugs, Martin Nowak
>
> (we can start with a few less or more of these)
>
> *Keep in mind these assignments are purely my speculation. And sure  
> thing it doesn't prevent anybody from working on "someone else" feature  
> branch. All these assignments mean is responsibility for pulling stuff  
> and forming separate (or on the contrary - cumulative) pulls on them for  
> HQ. Also allows them to polish and refactor things on the way up.
>
> Then the model works as follows:
>
> HQ repo gets pull requests prepared  by lieutenants *only* thus  
> *insuring* it's not some "for the **ck of it pull request" and lifting  
> ton of work for reviewing it.
>
> Pulls for features are targeted at specific repo thus *insuring* there  
> is at least one "major" guy how it supposed to work in this field (and  
> in the know of proper DMD's conventions). All dirty hack pulls get  
> stopped/re-written somewhere here.
>
> Also all of lieutenants repos should be kept rebased on top of master  
> (HQ) at all times. Thus Walter may even choose to cherry pick some  
> commits skipping the usual pull request process.
>

I like this. It neatly solves a whole lot of issues. Also, this is  
precisely how Linus INTENDED Git to be used.

-- 
Adam Wilson
IRC: LightBender
Project Coordinator
The Horizon Project
http://www.thehorizonproject.org/