Re: please try to avoid sending pullreqs late on release-candidate day

[Alex Bennée]

Philippe Mathieu-Daudé <philmd@redhat.com> writes:

> On 7/23/20 8:28 AM, Markus Armbruster wrote:
>> Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@linaro.org> writes:
>> 
>>> Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com> writes:
>>>
>>>> Am 21.07.2020 um 17:56 hat Peter Maydell geschrieben:
>>>>> It is not helpful if everybody sends their pullrequests late
>>>>> on the Tuesday afternoon, as there just isn't enough time in the
>>>>> day to merge test and apply them all before I have to cut the tag.
>>>>> Please, if you can, try to send pullrequests earlier, eg Monday.
>>>>
>>> <snip>
>>>>
>>>> So given that we _will_ have some late patches, what can we do to
>>>> improve the situation?
>>>>
>>>> Maybe I could send the pull request before testing it to save some time.
>>>> Your tests will take a while anyway, so if my own testing fails (e.g.
>>>> for the parts of iotests that you don't test), I would still have time
>>>> to NACK my own pull request. This wouldn't buy us more than an hour at
>>>> most and could lead to wasted testing effort on your side (which is
>>>> exactly the resource we want to save).
>>>>
>>>> Can you test multiple pull requests at once? The Tuesday ones tend to be
>>>> small (between 1 and 3 patches was what I saw yesterday), so they should
>>>> be much less likely to fail than large pull requests. If you test two
>>>> pull requests together and it fails so you have to retest one of them in
>>>> isolation, you still haven't really lost time compared to testing both
>>>> individually. And if it succeeds, you cut the testing time in half.
>>>
>>> I've taken to just stacking up patches from my multiple trees to avoid
>>> sending more than one PR a week. Of course sometimes the stack grows a
>>> bit too tall and becomes unwieldy :-/
>> 
>> You're right, stacking unrelated smaller pull requests makes sense when
>> pulling all the pull requests in flight races with a deadline.
>
> I tend to disagree, since few patches from the "candidate fixes for
> 5.1-rc1" series are still being discussed, and we are past rc1. Half
> of them could have been merged in for rc1.

Sometime I do peel of the patches that are already ready and push
through the PR - especially if the stack is getting a bit too wobbly.
However as rc1 had already passed I just continued to collect them.

After all splitting them off is not cost free as I like to ensure my
final tag has a clean run through our CI as well as an overnight soak
through some of the longer tests ("make docker-test-build" & the vm
tests). Usually I tag at the end of the day and then send the PR the
next morning.

I'm about to post v3 of the series - I'll aim to tag it all Friday
evening or over the w/e and post the PR on Monday.

-- 
Alex Bennée