ReactOS Development Process

[Aleksey Bragin]

        Hello,
recently, different people raised a question: How should development
process evolve with time, when ReactOS has more (much more)
developers willing to contribute code?
There are many possibilities, however all of them assume more or less
an overhead, and need additional human resources.
I will outline one suggested method, and want you (developers) to
"constructively criticize it", improve it, or offer a better method.
Even if it involves changing current version control system, or
anything - suggest the method.
So, the suggestion I've already got is this:
Trunk is writable only by a so-called Integrator person (maybe a few
persons). Branches are writable by a big amount of developers.
Typical development process is as follows:
1. A developer creates a ticket in issue-tracking system (currently
Bugzilla), where he describes what's wrong and what his change fixes/
improves.
2. He creates a branch with a name BZ-XYZ (where XYZ is ticket's
number), and commits his changes there.
3. An integrator, daily, goes through all BZ-... branches, does svn
merge to trunk of each branch, test it, if no regression occurs, he
commits changes to trunk and svn deletes the respective BZ-... branch.
Some kind of integration system is definitely needed, so please avoid
fast answers like "Let's stay as we do now". Better approach is
needed, and I'm looking for it. If you can offer something - do so.
With the best regards,
Aleksey Bragin.

[Magnus Olsen]

Hi
I think we should have something call stable trunk and devloping trunk
The stable trunk getting all changes that are ready and stable and it will
be
the release version of trunk.
the devloping trunk is where everyone working in
But the main problem is we do not have any good tools for regress testing
and we are missing testcase for each api. I am working at moment writing
testcase for gdi32, I hope this will make lest gdi32 allot more stable at
end
then I will start making testcase for win32k later maybe for user32
then start fixing the real bugs and implement things. or working with
everthing same times. we should need a test kit for each api and
test for evertging invaild param, pointers, and real data in all case
I known it is not fun todo but that is what we need to make ReactOS
more stable and less bugs. Testcase for everthing.

[Peter Ward]

It would seem to me that a distributed version control system would be a
much better solution. You could have the main ReactOS trunk and branches
for releases etc... for the main tree you could control access however
you like and individual devs could have whatever branches they like.
As for integration, you could have one test trunk which all the
developers commit to, then each commit is tested and if it passes then
the commit is merged with main trunk, failing commits have their revs
removed (Bazaar has this functionality at least) from the test trunk
along with a bug being opened and the patch sent to the bug.
This way you don't have all these branches to manage and a bug is only
opened on a broken commit and devs really don't change anything about
how they work.
There are a number of projects that could facilitate this fairly easily.
Anyway, just a couple of thoughts
Regards
Peter Ward
Aleksey Bragin wrote:
>           Hello,
>  recently, different people raised a question: How should development
>  process evolve with time, when ReactOS has more (much more)
>  developers willing to contribute code?
>  There are many possibilities, however all of them assume more or less
>  an overhead, and need additional human resources.
>  I will outline one suggested method, and want you (developers) to
>  "constructively criticize it", improve it, or offer a better method.
>  Even if it involves changing current version control system, or
>  anything - suggest the method.
>  So, the suggestion I've already got is this:
>  Trunk is writable only by a so-called Integrator person (maybe a few
>  persons). Branches are writable by a big amount of developers.
>  Typical development process is as follows:
>  1. A developer creates a ticket in issue-tracking system (currently
>  Bugzilla), where he describes what's wrong and what his change fixes/
>  improves.
>  2. He creates a branch with a name BZ-XYZ (where XYZ is ticket's
>  number), and commits his changes there.
>  3. An integrator, daily, goes through all BZ-... branches, does svn
>  merge to trunk of each branch, test it, if no regression occurs, he
>  commits changes to trunk and svn deletes the respective BZ-... branch.
>  Some kind of integration system is definitely needed, so please avoid
>  fast answers like "Let's stay as we do now". Better approach is
>  needed, and I'm looking for it. If you can offer something - do so.
>  With the best regards,
>  Aleksey Bragin.
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