[Development] Keep dependent projects in mind when approving changes

[lars.knoll at nokia.com]

On 10/25/11 10:51 PM, "ext marius.storm-olsen at nokia.com"
<marius.storm-olsen at nokia.com> wrote:

>Hi Maintainers and Approver,
>
>Please keep in mind dependent modules when you approve and merge in
>changes which can lead to dependent projects failing. If you know that a
>commit has a risk of destabilizing other modules, please ensure that you
>are prepared to also do a fix in the dependent module, to help mitigate
>those libraries failing their CI runs.
>
>I don't have the exact case handy right now, but have been told that
>recent commits in QtBase has made other modules fail their CI runs.

Let me add a bit to that. We do have multiple repositories and modules
being part of Qt. Breaking source compatibility in one of them does make
life difficult for the people working on the modules on top.

So I would like to encourage everybody to try to find ways to do these
kind of changes incrementally. If you e.g. plan on renaming a method, the
best way would be to add the new signature and mark the old one as
deprecated. Give a heads up and we can then remove the old one after 2-3
weeks when all dependent modules have changed to the new API.

In addition, I'd like to be added as a reviewer for changes that break
source compatibility with the public API of Qt 4.x. Please also add some
comment in the changes file in this case.

Cheers,
Lars