On 05/16/2012 12:38 AM, Alex Huang wrote:
Contributors - people who contribute in one way or another to the project
Committers - people who have commit access to the project's repo(s)
Maintainers - volunteers from the pool of committers who have stepped
forward to shepherd a single module. This is not a position of authority - but
rather one of responsibility - to ensure coding standards are met, that
accepted patches don't break things, etc.
So going into that, this is one area where I have difference opinion on
maintainer's responsibility.
In the write-up, it says "Review, and potentially acceptance, of code changes from
the community. The maintainer is responsible for testing that new contributions work and
do not break the application, and that the code changes are of high quality."
I think the maintainer should be responsible for making sure the process from feature design, code
design, code review, to unit testing and integration testing have been followed but I find that
"testing that new contributions work" to be challenging for a maintainer. I think the
committers need to prove as part of their patch that it doesn't break things. Maintainers can go
back and say "Well, you haven't proved this or that" and can give suggestions on how to
prove it.
What do others think?
I like this. Responsibility of testing a patch lies with the patch
submitter. If we make this the responsibility of the maintainer or
committer we will foster a "throw it over the wall" mentality that will
not be healthy in the long run. I do not think that this conflicts with
Dave's definitions.
That said, we also have to be reasonable what constitutes testing. Not
every contributor will be able to run a full test suite or test a given
patch in all possible scenarios. Thus the responsibility of testing is
really shared by many and not just the contributor - committer -
maintainer chain. But the initial responsibility must lie with the
contributor, IMHO.
Robert
--
Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU
SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX
Tech Lead
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