My +1 vote stands. The vote is about what we should do right now, not where we
should be ideally in 3 months. I don’t think we can move forward without
disabling the branch protection, because current CI is not in any state to base
the merge-decisions on. For example, here’s why:
1. Master branch protection is currently on. A change that breaks build was
still merged in on the 16th despite the protection. I wasn’t able to merge the
fix in yesterday for 8 hours because the CI tests fail.
2. False negative rate is currently too high (see the red crosses in
https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/pulls and
https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/commits/master)
People who are working on test infrastructure might say that it’s “enough work
to isolate and fix the current issues”, and I can certainly relate to that. On
the other hand, you too can probably empathize with the developers who has
“enough work to develop new features and write tests” without having to deal
with the broken CI. (note that my argument is on the CI system, and flaky test
cases are a separate issue).
Regarding “doesn't that mean that our users and customers are also going to
face those issues”, I honestly don’t think the argument stands. Release cycles
and distribution channels, as well as the safety measures are there exactly to
isolate the problems to the development branch and protect the users. If
anything, turning on branch protection on release branches should suffice.
Finally, master branch protection being off doesn’t mean PRs can be merged
without being tested. Contributors own the code quality and are responsible for
the changes. Committers and reviewers are there to ensure that merged changes
are OK.
Best regards,
-sz
On 11/19/17, 1:51 PM, "Marco de Abreu" <marco.g.ab...@googlemail.com> wrote:
Hello,
-1 (non binding)
Who is going to be responsible for changes breaking tests and having other
side effects after they have been merged? I'm afraid that this will harm
further development. At the moment I'm the responsible person for setting
up the new CI and so far have my results shown that not the CI itself is
the problem but also the stability of our code as well as the tests
themselves. At the moment we are having big issues to get a stable CI
because MXNet seems to be relying on so specific architectures,
dependencies and other factors which I'm not even able to track down that
this causes everything to be unstable.
Just to point it out: If we encounter so many problems while setting up a
CI system, doesn't that mean that our users and customers are also going to
face those issues as soon as things are getting more complicated? This is a
red flag in my opinion and I'm really looking forward to the usability
Sprint, but at the moment I'm afraid that an unprotected master will make
the situation even worse. It's already enough work to isolate and fix the
current issues, but if new untested changes get merged, this is going to be
like fighting a wildfire with a bottle of water.
So please revise your thoughts. If anybody is blocked by the protected
master, I would really appreciate it if they could approach me personally
in order to help stabilising the current situation. Just feeding in more
and more changes on one end while we're fixing issues on the other end
won't get us anywhere.
Best regards,
Marco
Am 19.11.2017 10:08 nachm. schrieb "Chris Olivier" <cjolivie...@gmail.com>:
> Revised:
>
>
> +1 at least until new CI is implemented. Then reevaluate.
>
> On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 1:07 PM Chris Olivier <cjolivie...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > +1
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 12:52 PM Zha, Sheng <zhash...@amazon.com> wrote:
> >
> >> +1
> >>
> >> Best regards,
> >> -sz
> >>
> >> On 11/19/17, 12:51 PM, "Eric Xie" <j...@apache.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi all,
> >> I'm starting this thread to vote on turning off protected master.
> The
> >> reasons are:
> >>
> >> 1. Since we turned on protected master pending PRs has grown from
40
> >> to 80. It is severely slowing down development.
> >>
> >> 2. Committers, not CI, are ultimately responsible for the code they
> >> merge. You should only override the CI when you are very confident that
> CI
> >> is the problem, not your code. If it turns out you are wrong, you
should
> >> fix it ASAP. This is the bare minimum requirement for all committers:
BE
> >> RESPONSIBLE.
> >>
> >> I'm aware of the argument for using protected master: It make sure
> >> that master is stable.
> >>
> >> Well, master will be most stable if we stop adding any commits to
> it.
> >> But that's not what we want is it?
> >>
> >> Protected master hardly adds any stability. The faulty tests that
> >> breaks master at random got merged into master because they happened to
> >> succeed once.
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >> Junyuan Xie
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
>
