Subject: Re: bug#63459: [PATCH] doc: Rewrite the branching strategy.

From: Christopher Baines <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2023 20:53:25 +0100

Maxim Cournoyer <[email-masked]> writes:

> Hi Chris,
>
> [...]
>
>>>> +To help coordinate the merging of branches, you must create a new
>>>> +guix-patches issue each time you wish to merge a branch (@pxref{The
>>>> +Issue Tracker}).  These issues indicate the order in which the branches
>>>> +should be merged, so take a look at the open issues for merging branches
>>>> +and mark the issue you create as @dfn{blocked} by the issue previously
>>>> +at the back of the queue@footnote{You can mark an issue as blocked by
>>>> +another by emailing @email{control@@debbugs.gnu.org} with the following
>>>> +line in the body of the email: @code{block XXXXX by YYYYY}. Where
>>>> +@code{XXXXX} is the number for the blocked issue, and @code{YYYYY} is
>>>> +the number for the issue blocking it.}.
>>>
>>> Maybe by default, since the strategy would be "first come, first
>>> merged", we can forego with the 'block' tags, as issues will already be
>>> posted in the order (and given an increasing number) they should be
>>> merged?  Then the nitty-gritty details of micro-managing block tags can
>>> be mentioned only when they are useful, e.g. ...
>>
>> That sounds fine to me.
>
> One disadvantage of this is that people must now manually find the
> preceding merge requests on the tracker; but if we have some convention
> prefix in the subject, e.g. 'MERGE' or similar (it's always implied we
> merge to master branch and nowhere else, correct?), that would still
> make it easy.  When the tooling (build coordinator) offers a web view of
> the branches to be merged that can be linked as well.

There's already a webpage featuring the branches and corresponding
issues, they feature in a table on [1]. The qa-frontpage makes the
assumption that the issue titles include the string "Request for
merging" and have the branch name in quotes, but that's just because
that was used as the title for [2].

1: https://qa.guix.gnu.org/
2: https://issues.guix.gnu.org/63521

As you say, it would be good to settle on a convention and mandate this
in contributing.texi.

As for where you're merging, yes, I'm assuming you're merging to master
here.

> So I think it's a LGTM.

Great, thanks for taking a look.