Re: [brlcad-devel] Proposed revisions to HACKING

[Christopher S. M. <br...@ma...>]

On Jan 30, 2011, at 10:35 AM, John Anderson wrote:

>     That looks good to me, Tom.
> 
>     How about an addition to CONTRIBUTOR RESPONSIBILITIES, item #0. Currently #0 is:
> 
> 0) Primum non nocere.  All contributors are expected in good faith to help, or at least to do no harm.
> 
>     I would like to see this expanded a bit as:
> 
> 0) Primum non nocere.  All contributors are expected in good faith to help, or at least to do no harm. In part, his means that changes should be tested to avoid commits that break existing code, and contributors should not make commits that prevent the package from building. Committing code that is "in process" is acceptable for collaborative reasons as long as the previous sentence is is not violated.

> 
>     What do you guys think??

Not bad, but the third-listed responsibility actually speaks to the point of compilation failures.  Moreover, that first point is actually intending to encompass much more than harming the build.  It applies to the project as a whole.  Development trolling, abusive user community support, and other "poisonous", NNPP, disruptive, non-productive behavior that go unchecked are project killers for some open source projects.  

> 

The difficulty with build failures is that even with successful testing, the build is still likely to become broken unless the developer happens to be on the same platform as everyone else.  That's why the responsibility speaks to it being absolutely on their hands to quickly fix (or revert) any failures reported.  Case in point, the Windows build is frequently broken by everyone because it's not actively tested.  Another case in point, the strictness measures have all been enabled only after passing a full distcheck build on mac and linux.  There have even been build failures post-release after being tested on *every* configuration we have our hands on (that's why there's a --disable-strict flag).

What we really need to get back online is continuous build integration so the build is tested after every commit on every platform configuration.  That was working great for a brief while.  Someone want to set up CruiseControl [1], CDash [2], or BuildBlot [3]?  IRC notification of failures would be awesome... :)

Cheers!
Sean

[1] http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://www.cdash.org/
[3] http://trac.buildbot.net/