On Saturday 2012-09-29 12:32 +1200, Chris Pearce wrote: > On 28/09/12 22:42, Bobby Holley wrote: > >Single-platform builds certainly won't catch those pesky WinXP-only > >browser-chrome oranges. But that's what mozilla-inbound is for. > > Inbound is not for catching pesky WinXP-only failures. Try is. > > So what if you have to wait overnight for a Try run to complete on > all platforms? Few patches so urgently need to land that they can't > wait until tomorrow to land. > > I'd even go as far to suggest that we should *require* a green Try > run before allowing people to land, for everything except "simple" > changes.
I disagree very strongly with this. The reason we don't want people causing red or orange on inbound is because it wastes the time of other developers trying to land and of the sheriffs managing the tree. Because of this, we want people who are landing on inbound to spend time to prevent this. However, there's a point of diminishing returns (where people are spending more time than the time of others that they'd save), and I think your proposal is well past that point, for a few reasons. First, having to wait to perform the next step in a process is a substantial cost in time. It requires mental context-switching, which has very substantial costs. Second, given the load on try, try builds are *also* wasting the time of other developers, since increasing the load on time increases the turnaround time on try for others, which, as I said above, is a substantial real cost in time. Third, there are large numbers of patches that really are cross-platform or platform-specific and are very unlikely to cause platform-specific problems or problems on other platforms. There are also patches that an experienced developer can tell are very unlikely to break anything. Developers shouldn't have to run these patches through full try runs when they're very unlikely to break things. I think the basic rule is that an individual developer ought to break Mozilla-Inbound rarely. If a developer never breaks Mozilla-Inbound, they're probably spending more extra time testing than the time they save of others interacting with Mozilla-Inbound. (And, worse, that might actually be wasting the time of many others by increasing wait times on Try.) -David -- 𝄞 L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ 𝄂 𝄢 Mozilla http://www.mozilla.org/ 𝄂 _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
