On Jul 13, 2009, at 5:02 PM, Darin Fisher wrote:
This small interval rule-of-thumb idea sounds pretty good, but I
still wish it didn't put the burden on the guy doing the branch to
figure out what is or isn't incomplete about a particular snapshot
of WebKit. That guy might not be savy enough to know what he should
be concerned about.
That's exactly who the burden should be on though. ToT is a
development tree. It's the organization shipping their product that
should be working to determine when their product is shippable.
The developer of the new feature, on the other hand, is the expert
and should be in the best position to know when their work is
shippable. It seems like there should be a low-cost way for such
developers to flag a feature as incomplete and then clear that flag
when it becomes safe to ship the feature. Afterall, it would seem
to be in that developer's best interest to not have their new work
shipped prematurely (thus causing its adoption to be stunted by
incompatibility issues).
Adding an ENABLE flag doesn't seem like that great of a tax to me.
I think it would be a great annoyance for very small features. I also
expect that people would sit on their feature until it was completely
done and stop properly staging work in order to avoid adding such
short-lived ifdefs to the project. That would just make the patch
review process more painful, and make it harder to track down
individual bugs caused by the lack of incremental landings.
Alternatively, perhaps there could be more communication from the
developer landing an incomplete feature? A simple heads-up to the
list might be enough. "Hey, I just landed the first part of HTML5
foo bar. Right now, everything is just stubbed out, but I will be
landing the implementation in the next few days."
I think that's an excellent idea. We could try to do that more via
checkin comments and ChangeLogs also.
dave
(hy...@apple.com)
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