[ruby-core:40758] Re: Proposal for sustainable branch maintenance

> == Proposal
> Let's parallelize the bottle-neck.
> Review and tests are necessary for stability and compatibility of
> released branches but these processes can be parallelized.
> I propose the following process:
>
> * A committer who fixed a bug in trunk should also check if the bug
>  reproduces with other active branches. If reproduces, (s)he should
>  create a backport request on the Redmine.
>  * Or anyone who want us to backport a commit in trunk can create a
>    backport request.
> * Another committer review the request. This reviewer checks if this
>  commit is good enough and backport it to the older branch.
> * Any committer who thinks the backport breaks compatiblity can revert
>  it.
>  * Eventually the maintainer of the branch decides to revert or not.
>
> CI and a new Redmine plugin can help this process.
> * Automatic request triggered by commit message?
>
> And the branch maintainer can have time to plan the next patch-level
> release.
>
>

What do you mean by "active branches"?  Should the "Branch Statuses" chart
at

    http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/projects/ruby/wiki/ReleaseEngineering

be updated so that everyone is clear as to which branches are considered
active? "Frozen" doesn't clearly convey "active".

Also, what do you think non-committers can do to help you parallelize the
backport bottlenecks?  At the end of the day it's always going to be a
commiter who has to review, approve, and backport so as to ensure
stability. But perhaps those of us who regularly build MRI can help offload
at least part of the work.

The challenge I see is that you don't want to create additional
bottleneck's by depending upon non-committers in order to commit timely
backports.  Non-committer contributions come and go on irregular schedules
not necessarily in sync with ruby-core timelines. From that perspective, I
don't yet see how non-committers can really help with the backports
bottleneck other than perhaps testing `trunk` patches against their
favorite "active" branch and reporting status in a backport request.

But perhaps you have a better idea how some of us might be able to help.

Jon

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