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

[Jed Brown]

Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> writes:

> On Oct 2, 2014, at 9:44 AM, Jed Brown <jed at jedbrown.org> wrote:
>
>> Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> writes:
>>>   Yup. Jed is saying our histories should be terrible.
>> 
>> ;-)
>> 
>> There is a balancing act between "quality" of long-term history, utility
>> of near-term history, and development effort/opportunity for mistakes.
>> I personally think the sweet spot is to prefer not to rebase that which
>> has been merged to 'next’.
>
>    But this is just a fluke of our testing approach. If I had 15
>    machines I could test all myself and not put major broken things
>    into next.

The unique thing that 'next' enables, but continuous integration cannot,
is having external users actually use the features.

If your view is that the test suite is a complete and unambiguous
specification for correct execution, then passing the test suite by
definition means that a feature is bug-free.  But if you view the test
suite as a proxy for "does consistent and useful things in user
applications", the test suite will never be perfect.  Merging to 'next'
allows "eager" users (including developers working with applications) to
experiment and give feedback.
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