Hi everyone, I believe this idea was raised briefly at a recent AC meeting, but here's a more concrete proposal. RFC: A streamlined process for cleanup patches ============================================== Rationale --------- Currently, commiting a change to Kata generally requires both a Github issue and a linked Github pull request. This works for bugs found "in the wild" and for feature/enhancement requests: it makes sense to discuss the change that needs to happen before moving on to how to implement it. However, this process works poorly for "cleanup" patches. That includes internal refactoring without changing external behaviour, and also bugs found by inspection where it's clear that the code doesn't behave as it should, but working backwards to find user inputs which would trigger the bug can be quite difficult. It's certainly possible to write an issue for such a fix, but it often ends up just re-iterating the same information as in the PR; the issue templates also don't help with it since they assume the report is coming from observation of behaviour, rather than inspection of code. In addition cleanup patches don't work well with the procedural checks which require each PR to have a patch labelled as fixing a Github issue. A well written cleanup PR will often consist of a number of small patches which each incrementally improve the code quality, but none of which could be said specifically to "fix" a clearly delineated problem. This means that someone writing a cleanup PR has to either arbitrarily place the "fixes #" tag on the last patch (which is misleading), or place it on all of them which could lead to prematurely closing the issue if an incomplete series is merged my mistake. To reduce barriers to people addressing technical debt in Kata, I therefore propose that we introduce a shorter process for reviewing and merging cleanup patches. Guidelines ---------- We don't want to stop encouraging well written reports for externally observed bugs, or enhancement requests. So, we need some guidelines as to what constitutes a "cleanup" PR. A PR which changes the code without changing any externally visible behaviour would certainly qualify. I think limiting to *only* that would be too restrictive though: that would disallow PRs which technically change behaviour but only in an obscure / unsupported / unimportant case. Likewise it would prevent fixing of bugs found by inspection - we want to encourage people to fix bugs, not slow them down with bureaucracy. Here are some possible guidelines that admittedly leave some fuzzy room in the middle: Considered a cleanup patch: * Internal refactoring with no external behaviour change * Rewording comments or documentation for clarity * Updates to developer facing documentation to match other cleanup changes NOT considered a cleanup patch: * Added functionality * Anything requiring user facing documentation to be updated to match code changes Process ------- There are several ways we could allow for a streamline cleanup process. Here are three options, which I'm soliciting opinions on: Option 1 (no issue required) * Cleanup PRs can be submitted with no accompanying Github issue * Such a PR must be tagged with a (new) 'cleanup' label * Scripts would be adjusted to to require a "fixes" tag on a cleanup labelled PR Advantages: - Minimum of overhead for small fixes Disadvantages: - Process would need to be documented elsewhere, with no ability for Github to guide people through it Option 2 (special issue template, minimal PR) * A new issue template for Cleanup is added alongside enhancement request, bug fix etc. * PRs attached to a cleanup issue are allowed / expected to be minimal, simply linking the issue with no further description required (individual patches in the PR should still have good commit messages, of course) Advantages: - Issue template can help guide people through the processz Disadvantages: - Still requires the extra step of creating both the issue and PR Option 3 (long-lived cleanup issues) * Cleanups can be attached to a specially labelled issue which describes not a specific problem, but rather a general area where cleanup / improvement might be desirable * PRs linked to a "cleanup" issue aren't expected to "fix" it, just to make some amount of improvement * Merging multiple PRs against the same cleanup issue would be normal * Scripts would be adjusted not to require a "fixes" tag on such a PR, but maybe a "improves" tag. Processing such a PR would *not* close the issue Advantages: - Allows incremental improvements to be merged quickly, without requiring them to fully "fix" some delineated problem Disadvantages: - Unclear when the right time to (manually) close such an issue would be, because it's now "good enough" -- David Gibson | I'll have my music baroque, and my code david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au | minimalist, thank you. NOT _the_ _other_ | _way_ _around_! http://www.ozlabs.org/~dgibson