FCP 20190401-ci_policy: CI policy

[Kristof Provost]

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’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