If code movement is not compressed into a tight time window, code movement
becomes a constant stream during development. A constant stream of code
movement is a constant stream of patch breakage, for any patch or project
not yet in-tree. The result is to increase the work and cost on any
contributor whose patches are not immediately merged.
For the record, since this is trending reddit, I __do__ support the end
result of 0.10 refactoring, the work towards the consensus lib.
My criticism is of a merge flow which _unintentionally_ rewards only
certain types of patches, and creates disincentives for working on other
types of patches.
On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 4:19 PM, Cory Fields <li...@coryfields.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 2:35 PM, Jeff Garzik <jgar...@bitpay.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 1:42 PM, Cory Fields <li...@coryfields.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> That's exactly what happened during the modularization process, with
> >> the exception that the code movement and refactors happened in
> >> parallel rather than in series. But they _were_ done in separate
> >> logical chunks for the sake of easier review.
> >
> >
> > "That's exactly what was done except it wasn't"
> >
> > Yes, in micro, at the pull request level, this happened
> > * Code movement
> > * Refactor
> >
> > At a macro level, that cycle was repeated many times, leading to the
> > opposite end result: a lot of tiny movement/refactor/movement/refactor
> > producing the review and patch annoyances described.
> >
> > It produces a blizzard of new files and new data structures, breaking a
> > bunch of out-of-tree patches, complicating review quite a bit. If the
> vast
> > majority of code movement is up front, followed by algebraic
> > simplifications, followed by data structure work, further patches are
> easy
> > to review/apply with less impact on unrelated code.
> >
>
> I won't argue that at all because it's perfectly logical, but in
> practice that doesn't translate from the macro level to the micro
> level very well. At the micro level, minor code changes are almost
> always needed to accommodate useful code movement. Even if they're not
> required, it's often hard to justify code movement for the sake of
> code movement with the promise that it will be useful later.
>
> Rather than arguing hypotheticals, let's use a real example:
> https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5118 . That one's pretty
> simple. The point of the PR was to unchain our openssl wrapper so that
> key operations could be performed by the consensus lib without
> dragging in bitcoind's structures. The first commit severs the
> dependencies. The second commit does the code movement from the
> now-freed wrapper.
>
> I'm having a hard time coming up with a workflow that would handle
> these two changes as _separate_ events, while making review easier.
> Note that I'm not attempting to argue with you here, rather I'm
> genuinely curious as to how you'd rather see this specific example
> (which is representative of most of my other code movement for the
> libbitcoinconsensus work, i believe) handled.
>
> Using your model above, I suppose we'd do the code movement first with
> the dependencies still intact as a pull request. At some later date,
> we'd sever the dependencies in the new files. I suppose you'd also
> prefer that I group a bunch of code-movement changes together into a
> single PR which needs little scrutiny, only verification that it's
> move-only. Once the code-movement PRs are merged, I can begin the
> cleanups which actually fix something.
>
> In practice, though, that'd be a massive headache for different
> reasons. Lots in flux with seemingly no benefits until some later
> date. My PR's can't depend on eachother because they don't actually
> fix issues in a linear fashion. That means that other devs can't
> depend on my PRs either for the same reason. And what have we gained?
>
> Do you find that assessment unreasonable?
>
> Cory
>
--
Jeff Garzik
Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist
BitPay, Inc. https://bitpay.com/
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