[Dev] Rotating build sheriff duties?

[Mike Taylor]

On Dec 7, 2005, at 2:18 PM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:

> As for who, I'd certainly be willing to do some or all of it.  I think 
> it wastes a lot of time and goodwill to have people being grilled or 
> criticized after the fact for checkin policies that could be 
> automatically enforced.  For example, if a particular tree is closed, 
> we simply shouldn't accept commits to it.  This is far more humane to 
> developers than trying to make them keep track of when they should or 
> shouldn't be doing what.  We're programmers - we're used to having the 
> machine tell us we did something wrong, and then dealing with it.

The only reason I don't turn off commits is that for every release 
cycle it's only *certain* devs who shouldn't commit - many times a 
commit is needed by me or qa or the product team to tweak version #'s, 
docs or other non-code related items.

> Meanwhile, we could save the should's and shaming for things that 
> matter more than raw procedure, especially since it's clear that they 
> aren't working very well for this.  To be honest, the idea that we 
> should do *more* of it rather than less, strikes me as "The kids are 
> being rowdy, let's try hitting them harder."  :)

What people *need* to do that they are not is simply watch the 
Tinderbox page - when you commit and the tree starts to show failures 
all devs who commited code should be looking at the reason why.

It really is that simple - the rotating sheriff duty would not be 
needed at all if each dev would monitor the build status page when they 
commit.

---
Bear

Build and Release Engineer
Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF)
bear at osafoundation.org
http://www.osafoundation.org

bear at code-bear.com
http://code-bear.com

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