[ovs-dev] [PATCH] CONTRIBUTING: Strengthen testing guidelines

[Justin Pettit]

> On Feb 8, 2016, at 10:54 AM, Russell Bryant <russell at ovn.org> wrote:
> 
> On 02/08/2016 01:03 PM, Justin Pettit wrote:
> 
> There are solutions to this problem, but it requires letting a CI system
> do the merging of patches for you.
> 
>> The Linux kernel does something similar.
>> Shame is often a good motivator.
> 
> I don't think shame is exactly the culture I'd like to promote.
> However, having travis-ci email committers whenever CI fails on a patch
> they pushed would be helpful.  It's easy to miss otherwise.
> 
> Maybe that's possible and I'm just missing the option in travis-ci ...

The "shame" comment was meant tongue-in-cheek, but I didn't want to overwhelm the message with smiley faces.  Sorry that didn't come through.

I just don't think this has been enough of an issue at this point that we need to introduce new commit infrastructure and procedures.  I think notifying people shortly after a commit from something like Travis that there is an issue will be sufficient.  If we start seeing regular problems that are not addressed promptly, then we should look more seriously at how to address it.

My guess is that switching to something like a gating infrastructure will introduce its own set of problem.  OVS works on a number of different platforms and gating on all those different builds and test suite runs will likely mean that commits are delayed by many minutes and possibly hours.  In my experience, those systems are often fragile, so it could result in indefinite delays for commits.

Do you think this has been that serious of a problem in practice?

--Justin