Thanks for raising this point Robert. I think it is important to remind the
community about the agreed practices once in a while.
In most of the cases I had the impression that the majority of the
community sticks to the agreed rules. W/o more detailed numbers (how many
of the hotfix commits are of category b) I think this discussion makes only
limited sense. Moreover, what is the underlying problem you would like to
solve here? Is it that too many commits have the hotfix tag in the commit
log? Is it that it's hard to figure out with which PR a hotfix commit has
been merged? Or did you observe a decline in Flink's quality because of too
many unreviewed changes? If we are discussing the latter case, then I think
it is very urgent. In the former cases I'm not entirely sure whether this
is an immediate problem because from what I have seen people include many
more clean up/hotfix commits in their PRs these days.
Concerning the proposed practice with the [minor] tag I'm a bit torn. The
benefit of not doing it like this is that it's easier to see which commits
need to be cherry-picked if a feature needs to be ported, for example. On
the other hand if the commits are not unrelated and the feature commits use
parts of the hotfix commits, then it makes the cherry-picking more tricky
and the commits should have the JIRA issue tag. But I would be fine with
trying it out.
Cheers,
Till
On Mon, Feb 17, 2020 at 3:56 PM Robert Metzger <rmetz...@apache.org>
wrote:
Hi all,
I would like to revive this very old thread on the topic of "unreviewed
hotfixes on master" again.
Out of the 35 commits listed on the latest commits page on GitHub, 18
have
the tag "hotfix", on the next page it is 9, then 16, 17, ...
In the last 140 commits, 42% were hotfixes.
For the sake of this discussion, let's distinguish between two types of
hotfixes:
a) *reviewed hotfix commits*: They have been reviewed through a pull
request, then committed to master.
b) *unreviewed hotfix commits*: These have been pushed straight to
master,
without a review.
It's quite difficult to find out whether a hotfix has been reviewed or
not
(because many hotfix commits are reviewed & pushed as part of a PR), but
here are some recent examples of commits where I could not find evidence
of
a pull request:
// these could probably be combined into on JIRA ticket, as they affect
the
same component + they touch dependencies
47a1725ae14a772ba8590ee97dffd7fdf5bc04b2 [hotfix][docs][conf] Log
included
packages / excluded classes
a5894677d95336a67d5539584b9204bcdd14fac5 [hotfix][docs][conf] Setup
logging
for generator
325927064542c2d018f9da33660c1cdf57e0e382 [hotfix][docs][conf] Add query
service port to port section
3c696a34145e838c046805b36553a50ec9bfbda0 [hotfix][docs][conf] Add query
service port to port section
// dependency change
736ebc0b40abab88902ada3f564777c3ade03001 [hotfix][build] Remove various
unused test dependencies
// more than a regeneration / typo / compile error change
30b5f6173e688ea20b82226db6923db19dec29a5 [hotfix][tests] Adjust
FileUtilsTest.testDeleteSymbolicLinkDirectory() to handle unsupported
situations in Windows
fc59aa4ecc2a7170bfda14ffadf0a30aa2b793bf [FLINK-16065][core] Unignore
FileUtilsTest.testDeleteDirectoryConcurrently()
// dependency changes
fe7145787a7f36b21aad748ffea4ee8ab03c02b7 [hotfix][build] Remove unused
akka-testkit dependencies
dd34b050e8e7bd4b03ad0870a432b1631e1c0e9d [hotfix][build] Remove unused
shaded-asm7 dependencies
// dependency changes
244d2db78307cd7dff1c60a664046adb6fe5c405 [hotfix][web][build] Cleanup
dependencies
In my opinion, everything that is not a typo, a compile error (breaking
the
master) or something generated (like parts of the docs) should go
through a
quick pull request.
Why? I don't think many people review changes in the commit log in a way
they review pull request changes.
In addition to that, I propose to prefix hotfixes that have been added as
part of a ticket with that ticket number.
So instead of "[hotfix] Harden kubernetes test", we do
"[FLINK-13978][minor]
Harden kubernetes test".
Why? For people checking the commit history, it is much easier to see if
a
hotfix has been reviewed as part of a JIRA ticket review, or whether it
is
a "hotpush" hotfix.
For changes that are too small for a JIRA ticket, but need a review, I
propose to use the "[minor]" tag. A good example of such a change is
this:
https://github.com/apache/flink/commit/0dc4e767c9c48ac58430a59d05185f2b071f53f5
My tagging minor changes accordingly in the pull requests, it is also
easier for fellow committers to quickly check them.
Summary:
[FLINK-XXXX]: regular, reviewed change
[FLINK-XXXX][minor]: minor, unrelated changes reviewed with a regular
ticket
[minor]: minor, reviewed change
[hotfix]: unreviewed change that fixes a typo, compile error or something
generated
What's your opinion on this?
On Sat, May 28, 2016 at 1:36 PM Vasiliki Kalavri <
vasilikikala...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi all,
in principle I agree with Max. I personally avoid hotfixes and always
open
a PR, even for javadoc improvements.
I believe the main problem is that we don't have a clear definition of
what
constitutes a "hotfix". Ideally, even cosmetic changes and
documentation
should be reviewed; I've seen documentation added as a hotfix that had
spelling mistakes, which led to another hotfix... Using hotfixes to do
major refactoring or add features is absolutely unacceptable, in my
view.
On the other hand, with the current PR load it's not practical to ban
hotfixes all together.
I would suggest to update our contribution guidelines with some
definition
of a hotfix. We could add a list of questions to ask before pushing
one.
e.g.:
- does the change fix a spelling mistake in the docs? => hotfix
- does the change add a missing javadoc? => hotfix
- does the change improve a comment? => hotfix?
- is the change a small refactoring in a code component you are
maintainer
of? => hotfix
- did you change code in a component you are not very familiar with /
not
the maintainer of? => open PR
- is this major refactoring? (e.g. more than X lines of code) => open
PR
- does it fix a trivial bug? => open JIRA and PR
and so on...
What do you think?
Cheers,
-V.
On 27 May 2016 at 17:40, Greg Hogan <c...@greghogan.com> wrote:
Max,
I certainly agree that hotfixes are not ideal for large refactorings
and
new features. Some thoughts ...
A hotfix should be maven verified, as should a rebased PR. Travis is
often
backed up for half a day or more.
Is our Jira and PR process sufficiently agile to handle these
hotfixes?
Will committers simply include hotfixes with other PRs, and would it
be
better to retain these as smaller, separate commits?
For these cosmetic changes and small updates will the Jira and PR
yield
beneficial documentation addition to what is provided in the commit
message?
Counting hotfixes by contributor, the top of the list looks as I
would
expect.
Greg
Note: this summary is rather naive and includes non-squashed hotfix
commits
included in a PR
$ git shortlog --grep 'hotfix' -s -n release-0.9.0..
94 Stephan Ewen
42 Aljoscha Krettek
20 Till Rohrmann
16 Robert Metzger
13 Ufuk Celebi
9 Fabian Hueske
9 Maximilian Michels
6 Greg Hogan
5 Stefano Baghino
3 smarthi
2 Andrea Sella
2 Gyula Fora
2 Jun Aoki
2 Sachin Goel
2 mjsax
2 zentol
1 Alexander Alexandrov
1 Gabor Gevay
1 Prez Cannady
1 Steve Cosenza
1 Suminda Dharmasena
1 chengxiang li
1 jaoki
1 kl0u
1 qingmeng.wyh
1 sksamuel
1 vasia
On Fri, May 27, 2016 at 6:10 AM, Maximilian Michels <m...@apache.org>
wrote:
Hi Flinksters,
I'd like to address an issue that has been concerning me for a
while.
In the Flink community we like to push "hotfixes" to the master.
Hotfixes come in various shapes: From very small cosmetic changes
(JavaDoc) to major refactoring and even new features.
IMHO we should move away from these hotfixes. Here's why:
1) They tend to break the master because they lack test coverage
2) They are usually not communicated with the maintainer or person
working on the part being fixed
3) They are not properly documented for future reference or
follow-ups
(JIRA/Github)
That's why I have chosen not to push hotfixes anymore. Even for
small
fixes, I'll open a JIRA/Github issue. The only exception might be
fixing a comment. It improves communication, documentation, and
test
coverage. All this helps to mature Flink and develop the community
in
a transparent way.
I'm not sure what our contribution guidelines say about this but I
would like to update them to explicitly address hotfixes. Let me
know
what you think.
Best,
Max
