[llvm-dev] [cfe-dev] [Github] RFC: linear history vs merge commits (original) (raw)

Peter Wu via llvm-dev llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
Fri Feb 1 14:48:32 PST 2019

On Fri, Feb 01, 2019 at 12:41:05PM -0500, Arthur O'Dwyer via cfe-dev wrote:

I know GitHub can be configured to reject force-pushes to {any, a specific} branch. I strongly suspect that if *the maintainers of LLVM* asked nicely, GitHub would also be able to reject merges to {any, a specific} branch.

Anyone with admin permissions in a repo can add "branch protection rules" that prevent force pushes, there is no need to contact Github support for that.

- GitHub PRs have Travis integration so the reviewer can see if a particular patch is actually compileable at all, before spending time looking at it. I wish Phab had this feature (or maybe it exists and LLVM doesn't use it?).

This kind of pre-merge testing is very valuable, it could potentially prevent some unnecessary reverts by catching issues early.

On caveat is that the test coverage would be limited or else the build times would be very long. There are quite some builders for various projects (llvm, cfe, compiler-rt, etc.) on a lot of different platforms and targets (Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, etc.).

With limited resources, Arthur's suggestion seems workable to me:

I would also be in favor of linear history for reasons mentioned before (easier bisection, more readable logs). Though whatever choice happens (cherry-pick vs merge), I think it is important to keep the link between a change and the review. I have seen various strategies:

Projects that are use mailing lists to review patches (like Linux and QEMU) commonly include a Message-Id tag in the commit message that references the original mailing list discussion.

The curl project also uses Github for reviews, but encourages developers with push permissions to manually fetch the commit, edit the commit message to reference the review and then push to the master branch (with no merge commits). Again, this is a manual process and new developers who are not familiar with this process accidentally create a merge commit anyway (or forget to reference the review).

Ideally changes go through a single gatekeeper, a tool that recognizes comments to a merge request and subsequently tries to add extra info to a commit message (link to a review) and enforce a linear history (by cherry-picking changes or rebase + merge commits). This tool could be triggered by posting comments like "@name-of-the-bot merge this". (If necessary this could be combined with requiring tests to pass.)

Such an extra indirection with a single gatekeeper could be a quite drastic change from the current development model though. It could reduce the number of broken builds and improve the quality of commit messages though.

Just my two cents, hope it helps :)

Kind regards, Peter Wu https://lekensteyn.nl

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