[Development] Notes on "Managing Qt's branches" session @ QCS 2016

[Liang Qi]

On 12 September 2016 at 11:20, Edward Welbourne <edward.welbourne at qt.io>
 wrote:

> Marc Mutz said:
> > The obvious question is, then, why is only "the one person" doing merges?
> > Allow more people to upload merges, and you will get the spreading you
> desire.
>
> Several people can upload merges.
> One person looks after integration in qt5 and all its sub-modules.
> We can spread the load (indeed, I carried it for a few weeks while
> Liang was on holiday), and I believe module owners can do their own
> merges (which saves the integration team work), but the integration team
> takes responsibility for ensuring merges are happening.
> So it ends up being that Liang, as integrator, does most merges.
>

We have some/many modules are in not active mode, so the merges for them
are normally based on the release schedules. That's one of the reason to
have a merger.

A heavy load for mergers and integrators is that the new CI, COIN, doesn't
have reverse dependency check like old CI. Then if sth changed in qtbase or
qtdeclarative, the merge and integration will trigger the issue. Then very
often it's a bit difficult for us to analysis the root cause and find right
persons to fix it.

Perhaps we should set up a rule for deprecated sth, for example,
1. notify merger/integrator/others, or just add them into a list in a
wiki/web page
2. the dev of the deprecated change should do a "git grep" in all qt
project, and at least provide a fix for one of them, better to do all

For merges, the maintainers of modules should take care. At least,
qtquickcontrols2/qtwebengine are very well, it's also because developers
there are working on different features in different branches, they care
the merge themselves.

For some other modules, like qt3d/qtmultimedia/qtwayland, the help from the
maintainers and developers are also very good.

But for qtbase, it's a totally different story, too many areas, so normally
we(or I) can't say there is an active maintainer for the whole of qtbase. A
regular merge for qtbase is needed, for example, weekly. And if we can't
get response from devs very soon, who can help?

Give the merge permission to everyone is obiviously not a solution. But it
will help a lot if we have an active merger/integrator group, at least for
review.

Regards,
Liang
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