[Elftoolchain-developers] The UQDS

[Joseph K. <jk...@us...>]

Hello All,

I recently came across a description of the way the Twisted (Python)
project develops their code and thought that it would be a good fit
for our project too:

 * http://divmod.org/trac/wiki/UltimateQualityDevelopmentSystem
 * http://shiny.thorne.id.au/2006/09/ultimate-quality-whats-that.html

In a nutshell, the core of the system is:

1) /trunk always builds and passes its tests.  This allows people to
  'svn cp trunk' and start work with the assurance that the code will
  be in a sane state.

2) Work happens on SVN branches; one SVN branch per
  (bug/feature/skunk-works) project.

  There would a ticket associated with every change.to trunk.  The
  ticket serves a "top level container" referencing everything needed
  to understand the change; e.g., links to wiki pages, lists of
  related tickets, lists of related source changes etc.

3) Work gets folded back into /trunk after review.  The main goal of
  the review is so that at least one more person has fully understood
  the proposed change.  Of course, bugs would also be caught by the
  review.

  Since code in branches is separate from /trunk, a developer need
  not wait for the reviewer and can start on another work item (i.e.,
  another branch) right away.

As a concrete example, let us say we want to create manual pages for
our tools and libraries.  We would:

* Create a ticket [#27 in this case].

* Create a branch with "svn cp trunk branches/27-manualpages"

 The convention being to name branches using the pattern
 TICKET#-SHORTDESCRIPTIVENAME, so that people can know at a glance
 where to go to find out more information.

* Do the work under branch "27-manualpages"; ticket #27 would track
 the state of this work.

* Once done and reviewed, the changes would be merged back to /trunk.
 The invariant maintained for /trunk is that it always is in a sane
 state.

* The work branch can then be "svn remove'd" to clean up the namespace
 under "branches/".

Thoughts?

Koshy