[Python-Dev] Community buildbots and Python release quality metrics

[glyph at divmod.com]

On 26 Jun, 09:24 pm, guido at python.org wrote:
>On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 1:06 PM,  <glyph at divmod.com> wrote:
>>On 07:44 pm, g.brandl at gmx.net wrote:

>Well, sorry, that's life. We're not going to deal with breakage in 3rd
>party code on a "drop all other work" basis.

For the record, "automatic revert" does not mean "drop all other work". 
The changeset's still there.  It's still in the revision history.  It 
can easily be applied to anybody's working copy.  It can easily be put 
into a branch.  It can be automatically re-merged later.  I do all of 
these things all the time, and I was *not* intending to suggest that any 
3rd-party breakage should cause a code freeze or anything even remotely 
like that.
>>Case in point: changes to the warnings module

>I disagree. It's broken and should be fixed. Beta 1 just came out so
>this is the perfect time to file a bug.

I'll go back over the recent conversation and work out the specifics of 
the bug (if JP doesn't, or hasn't already beaten me to it).
>>(...) it would have been easier to
>>convince a Twisted developer to do the work it to keep the community
>>buildbot green rather than to make it a bit less red.
>
>Why? That sounds like it's a problem with the psychology of the
>Twisted developers.

I hardly think it's unique to us.  TDD test runners typically only know 
2 colors and 2 states: "passed" and "fails".  Once you're in the "fail" 
state, you tend to accumulate more failures; there's a much bigger bang 
for your buck.  Better tools with nicer interfaces would let you easily 
mark individual tests as "usually intermittent" or something and make it 
a "slightly dirty green" or something, but we don't have those.  The 
move from "red" to "green" is much more psychologically significant to 
just about anyone I know than the move from "red but 14 failures" to 
"red but 12 failures".

Despite the idea's origins in a now-highly-controversial book on 
criminology, this is often referred to in XP discussion circles (wikis 
and the like) as the "fix broken windows" collaboration pattern.  I 
notice this in lots of other areas of my life; a little pile of papers 
tends to become a big pile of papers, the first dent in a car makes the 
driver a little less careful, and so on.