[phobos] [D-Programming-Language/phobos] a15e68: Accidentally committed with a bunch of debugging c...

[Jonathan M Davis]

> >> Actually, one of my big concerns with using pull requests is that I want
> >> near-instant feedback from the auto tester to make sure my stuff works
> >> on all platforms.  It's frustrating to have to wait an indeterminate
> >> amount of time for such feedback.
> > 
> > I definitely understand that, but if we do that, then code isn't getting
> > reviewed. And the reviews on github have definitely been helping improve
> > code. As far as code quality goes, pull requests are very much a good
> > thing.
> 
> Probably the matter of auto-testing should be best solved by improving
> the auto-tester.
> 
> One thing that has been learned at Facebook the hard way is that
> seemingly trivial changes can actually introduce pernicious bugs. Also,
> it's difficult to draw a line between what's trivial and what isn't.
> Today there is virtually no change to the main trunk that has not been
> seen by at least one extra person than the committer.
> 
> There aren't a lot of us but I think it shouldn't be difficult for each
> of us to look over and merge a pull request once in a while. Only in
> case a minor pull request just sits there for a while and repeated
> emails cause no answer, I think it's okay at our organization size to
> just allow the pull request author to pull the code.

One possible solution to the need to know whether code works on a particular 
platform would be to check in the code into a branch on github and then make a 
request on the newsgroup (be it the Phobos newsgroup or the main newsgroup) 
that someone with a particular platform pull the code and verify that it 
compiles and passes the unit tests. It's not instantaneous, but it could be 
that there's a good chance that someone would be able to test the code for you 
within a day or less (especially if you posted on the main newsgroup). That's 
not as nice as having a way to automatically verify that it works on all 
platforms, but it would be a way to verify that it works on other platforms 
without having to affect the master branch.

- Jonathan M Davis