Open Stack

On 19 Jul 2016, at 11:56, Dean Troyer wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 12:27 PM, John Dickinson <me at not.mn> wrote:
>
>> Overall, using long-lived upstream feature branches has been very helpful
>> for us and overall a positive experience.
>>
>> I've seen some other teams debate and discuss using a feature branch for
>> their work but wonder about how it works. I've written down our experiences
>> with using feature branches as part of OpenStack development, including
>> some recommendations that help things go smoothly.
>>
>> https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Swift/feature_branches
>>
>
> Seriously nice writeup John & Swift team, thanks! I wish I had the benefit
> of that in May when I chose not to do a feature branch for OSC's impending
> major release, it would have removed the fear of the unknown from that
> choice.
>
> I am wondering if there are any corresponding bits of negative advice
> around feature branches, of the sort 'don't do X, even if it seems like a
> good idea, here is why it is not'.  This is how I see our stance on Git
> submodules for example.

I tried to add some of those in the writeup. Feature branches will start relatively very slowly. If you put docs at the start of a review branch, you'll get a *ton* of nit comments that really slow merging down. The whole fact that our OpenStack workflow requires (or strongly suggests) the -review branch is somewhat burdensome.

But overall, I really love the experience we've had with feature branches. Swift has been able to land seriously huge features (storage polices, erasure coding, and crypto) because of them, and still keep all the development in the open community.

Yeah, there are some hard parts, but most of that is related to other issues or gaps in the OpenStack community (eg tracking/planning work) and is unrelated to using a feature branch or not.


I'm glad you find the writeup helpful. I'd encourage all teams to consider feature branches for long-lived major feature development.

--John



>
> dt
>
> -- 
> Dean Troyer
> dtroyer at gmail.com
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