[Buildroot] Evaluation of the 2014.02 stabilization cycle

[Arnout Vandecappelle]

On 01/03/14 17:16, Thomas De Schampheleire wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Buildroot 2014.02 has been released, and I'd like to take this
> opportunity to reflect on the stabilization cycle of this release
> (during the month of February). Feel free to share your thoughts
> too...
> 
> What I liked was:
> - many developers analyzing and fixing autobuild failures. I have seen
> autobuild fixes passing by during the entire month, until the very
> end, and this has made a great improvement in our 'out-of-the-box
> experience'. Looking at the statistics [1], at the beginning of the
> month we were around 50% success rate, while we were able to reach 87%
> at the day of the release!
> Moreover, a number of the remaining problems are already analyzed and
> will be fixed in the next release, although we can expect new failures
> coming in now that the -next branch has been merged into master.
> 
> - several improvements to the documentation have been sent. While our
> documentation is already pretty good, things can always improve, so
> these patches were very welcome!
> 
> - the fact that patches intended for 2014.02 (be it autobuild fixes,
> documentation improvements, or other fixes) were applied swiftly by
> Peter. Specifically for the autobuild results this was very useful, as
> it allowed each day to show new failures (previously eclipsed by
> existing failures).
> 
> - the fact that we closed a large amount of bugs. During the entire
> month of February, we closed 36 bugs [2], and today there are only 16
> bugs remaining [3]! Of these bugs, 7 are new packages.

 +1 to all of this.

> 
> 
> What I did not like so much:
> 
> - the fact that many feature patches (that never had a chance to enter
> 2014.02) were sent during the stabilization cycle, even by regular
> contributors. While I realize that we cannot expect non-regular
> contributors to respect the standard release cycle, this is not true
> for regular contributors.

 I agree that this is annoying, but I didn't see it happening... Yann
sent two patch series recently, but one of them (the kernel headers) was
potentially still for 2014.02, and the other one (virtual package
infrastructure) was an RFC that indeed hasn't been applied yet. ThomasP.
sent the NPTL knobs but that is something that fixes build issues so was
also potentially for 2014.02. Anything else I missed?


> There are two reasons why I find this inconvenient:
> 
> 1. The large amount of feature patches clutters the mailing list, in
> the sense that it is more difficult to see which mails/patches are
> relevant for the upcoming release and which are for the next.
> 
> 2. During the stabilization month, all the (limited) time that I can
> spent on buildroot is spent on the upcoming release. This means that I
> fully ignore any patch that is not intended for that release, which
> means I won't review it (even though I would review the patch had it
> come at another moment in the release cycle). If other people act the
> same way, this means that patches sent during the stabilization month
> receive less reviews than others.

 I completely agree with that. However, I do think that Peter did a good
job of applying only patches that already had acks or seen sufficient review.


 Regards,
 Arnout


> 
> To conclude, I would prefer if the focus of (almost) all regular
> contributors would be on the stabilization of the release, and the
> ongoing support of users, rather than sending/reviewing patches for
> the next release.
> 
> 
> Obviously, all of the above is just my opinion, and I welcome your own
> opinions and feedback.
> 
> Thanks,
> Thomas
> 
> [1] http://autobuild.buildroot.org/stats.php
> [2] https://bugs.busybox.net/buglist.cgi?chfieldto=2014-02-28&query_format=advanced&chfieldfrom=2014-02-01&bug_status=RESOLVED&bug_status=VERIFIED&bug_status=CLOSED&product=buildroot
> [3] https://bugs.busybox.net/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=__open__&product=buildroot&content=
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-- 
Arnout Vandecappelle                          arnout at mind be
Senior Embedded Software Architect            +32-16-286500
Essensium/Mind                                http://www.mind.be
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