Folks,
It is truly disappointing how we are escalating situations that can be resolved
through basic communication.
Things that shouldn’t have happened
- After a few objections were raised, commits should have simply stopped before
restarting again but only after consensus
- Reverts (or revert and move to a feature-branch) shouldn’t have been
unequivocally done without dropping a note / informing everyone / building
consensus. And no, not even a release-manager gets this free pass. Not on
branch-2, not on trunk, not anywhere.
- Freaking out on -1’s and reverts - we as a community need to be less
stigmatic about -1s / reverts.
Trunk releases:
This is the other important bit about huge difference of expectations
between the two sides w.r.t trunk and branching. Till now, we’ve never made
releases out of trunk. So in-progress features that people deemed to not need a
feature branch could go into trunk without much trouble. Given that we are now
making releases off trunk, I can see (a) the RM saying "no, don’t put
in-progress stuff and (b) the contributors saying “no we don’t want the
overhead of a branch”. I’ve raised related topics (but only focusing on
incompatible changes) before - http://markmail.org/message/m6x73t6srlchywsn
<http://markmail.org/message/m6x73t6srlchywsn> - but we never decided anything.
We need to at the least force a reset of expectations w.r.t how trunk and small
/ medium / incompatible changes there are treated. We should hold off making a
release off trunk before this gets fully discussed in the community and we all
reach a consensus.
> * Without a user API, there's no way for people to use it, so not much
> advantage to having it in a release
>
> Since the code is separate and probably won't break any existing code, I
> won't -1 if you want to include this in a release without a user API, but
> again, I question the utility of including code that can't be used.
Clearly, there are two sides to this argument. One side claims the absence of
user-facing public / stable APIs, and that for all purposes this is dead-code
for everyone other than the few early adopters who want to experiment with it.
The other argument is to not put this code before a user API. Again, I’d
discuss with fellow community members before making what the other side
perceives as unacceptable moves.
From 2.8.0 perspective, it shouldn’t have landed there in the first place - I
have been pushing for a release for a while with help only from a few members
of the community. But if you say that it has no material impact on the user
story, having a by-default switched-off feature that *doesn’t* destabilize the
core release, I’d be willing to let it pass.
+Vinod
