[petsc-dev] does next model mess up our histories

[Barry Smith]

On Oct 2, 2014, at 12:33 AM, Satish Balay <balay at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> On Thu, 2 Oct 2014, Satish Balay wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, 2 Oct 2014, Jed Brown wrote:
>> 
>>> Satish Balay <balay at mcs.anl.gov> writes:
>>>>>  Ok, if this can be documented and made as simple as possible? A
>>>>>  tool to do it? If it requires remember several arcane git commands
>>>>>  to do and remember the numbers of 5 merges you made, then forget
>>>>>  it.
>>>> 
>>>> Perhaps Jed will reply with a simpler 'single' command to do the
>>>> revert all the merges from the feature branch - and an easy way to
>>>> verify.
>>> 
>>> Nope, but I don't recommend these reverts because it makes it more
>>> confusing to follow 'next' and to find which commit introduced a change
>>> (when debugging something in 'next').  My preference is that in normal
>>> workflow, you don't rebase/modify that which has been merged to 'next'.
>>> If it's catastrophically wrong, then revert on 'next' and start over,
>>> but if it just needs a tweak, do that on top of your branch.
>> 
>> I think is ok to be a bit more messy in next. Sure there is a tradeoff
>> - but you get better debugging in master :)
>> 
>> We shouldn't be doing rebase for every feature branch (thats merged to
>> next) - but for the very few that might need it - we should ok to do
>> it.
>> 
>> And it should be done only when the feature is deemed *complete* [say
>> 1-2 weeks of cooking in next - without a need for updates]
> 
> I guess another alternative for these veryfew feature branches
> that need to iterate over nightlytest suites is:
> 
> - never merge feature branch to next untile its complete

   This is silly. I lose all the portability testing that next provides and would never be able to merge into next because I know things will be broken.

   Yupp definitely something wrong with our current model. Seems to me we should just restart next from master every few days.


> - switch master or next nightlytest to feature branch [for a few days]
> - fix rebase feature branch as needed.
> 
> [would perhaps require test infrastructure improvements - and an
> apriori knowledge that this feature branch could go through major back
> and forth changes requiring multiple rebases]
> 
> Satish