Milan Jurik writes:
> The decision "what's related and what isn't" is very subjective.

I think that's a key observation.  Only the responsible engineer (with
guidance his code/design reviewers and RTI Advocate) can determine
what's an appropriate course of action -- not just for what CRs to
combine in one go, but also for the scope of a fix, testing required,
and other issues.

Thus, I don't think "prohibit" is really appropriate or possible here.

> Personally I would prefer in one changeset only cross=depending CRs but
> I am alone probably :-)

I don't think you're alone on that.  It's the situation-dependent
definition of "cross-depending" that I think is at issue.

For yet another example, if I were fixing one or two CRs in a single
technical area, I'd make sure I included as many small fixes in that
area as I could (with separate, likely lower-priority CRs), even if
the issues in those other CRs are otherwise "unrelated."

I would do this for efficiency reasons.  I don't want to pester the
same list of code reviewers N separate times for each of N CRs.  I
don't want to waste N times the amount of effort going through testing
and filing RTIs.  I don't want to cost the RTI advocate (probably the
same guy for each one) N times the effort to review each of these
separate RTIs.  I certainly don't want to futz with the tools enough
to keep these changesets separate all the way up to a "push."

More importantly, *not* doing this sort of bundling means that
low-priority (but annoying and customer-dissatisfaction-generating)
CRs are simply never addressed.  Ever.  They rot in the database, and
the code rots as a result.

I think bundling like that is a good thing.  People should be
encouraged to clean up the neighborhood when making fixes.  If they're
not, then those "other" CRs will likely linger forever as the priority
never makes them reasonable to fix.

You're probably right that bundling together (say) "update Perl to
version 1234" and "fix TCP retransmit bug" would be foolish.  I don't
think anyone's going to do something like that, though, and thus my
previous comment.  "Prohibit" is just too strong.  Heck, even
discouraging bundling might be wrong, as it encourages poor behavior,
and allows the system to rot over time.

-- 
James Carlson, Solaris Networking              <james.d.carlson at sun.com>
Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive        71.232W   Vox +1 781 442 2084
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