Re: Yet another bootstrap failure: Required feature `esh-groups' was not provided

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > None of the projects I'm involved with that have something similar to
 > "bootstrap" use the kind of ``fire at will'' commit policy we use in
 > Emacs.  Those other projects all have some kind of mandatory
 > review-before-commit policy for all but a few extremely trusted
 > developers.  At peer review time, problems can be detected before they
 > do any harm.

Interesting theory.  However, the way it actually works in some
projects is that the review-before-commit policy is mandatory for the
extremely trusted developers, too.  They're not trusted to do it right
the first time, they're trusted to get it right by the time they
commit.  The difference between them and the common herd is that they
are trusted to know when they need peer review (changes in the build
process are one example), and when they can review their own code
(straightforward bug fixes are most common).

Eg, Python has at least as many people who can commit on their own
responsibility as Emacs does, but build breakage on the half-dozen
"common" platforms is rare[1], and I've never seen threads on
regressions in the build for parts of the project implemented in
Python.  The practice of having trusted developers do self-review is
enabled by infrastructure including a test suite containing about 500
files and a "buildbot" network.


Footnotes: 
[1]  Admittedly, they typically lag about 3 years on supporting
Microsoft "native" compilers.  I can understand that, though.<wink>