FCP 20190401-ci_policy: CI policy

[Konstantin Belousov]

On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 05:02:47PM +0200, Kristof Provost wrote:
> On 29 Aug 2019, at 16:42, Konstantin Belousov wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 02:03:00PM +0200, Kristof Provost wrote:
> >> There are, somewhat regularly, commits which break functionality, or 
> >> at
> >> the very least tests.
> >> The main objective of this policy proposal is to try to improve 
> >> overall
> >> code quality by encouraging and empowering all committers to 
> >> investigate
> >> and fix test failures.
> > But this policy does not encourage, if anything.
> > It gives a free ticket to revert, discouraging committers.
> >
> To provide a counterpoint here: my personal frustration right now is 
> that I’ve spent a good bit of time adding tests for pf and fixing bugs 
> for it, only to see the tests having to be disabled because of unrelated 
> (to pf) changes in the network stack.
> 
> Either through lack of visibility, or lack of time, or because people 
> assume pf tests failures must by definition be the responsibility of the 
> pf maintainer, these failures have not been investigated by anyone other 
> than me, and I lack the time and subject matter expertise to fix them.
> 
> I’m desperately afraid that if/when these bugs do get fixed we’re 
> going to discover that other things have broken in the mean time, and 
> the tests are still going to fail, for different reasons.
> 
> These are bugs. They’re the best case scenario for bug reports even, 
> because they come with a reproduction case built-in, and yet they’re 
> still not getting fixed. This too is discouraging.
I fully agree with your attitude there, and understand your frustration.
IMO the right action would be to contact the committers who did the
relevant changes, first.  Was it done ?  What was their response ?

If they are silent, next action would be some public mail.

Do you know where the bug is ? If yes, how hard is to fix it ?

> 
> I’m open to alternative proposals for how to address that problem, but 
> I don’t think that “continue on as we always have” is the correct 
> answer.
> 
> Best regards,
> Kristof