[BuildStream] Disruptive changes

[Sander Striker <s striker striker nl>]

Hi,

I've been going through the archives to see what happened while I was away for a bit.  I'd like to pick an example and use that to make a more generic point about disruptive changes.

I see that plugins have been started to be moved out of core and into bst-external and bst-plugins-experimental.  Which caused fallout like breakage in tests.  While we agreed in principle that moving plugins out of the core into domain specific repositories, that has been a while (months ago).  In cases like these, where we know the changes [may be] disruptive, I would expect a post to the mailinglist with a heads up and a [reference to a] plan of how the disruptive change is going to be made.

For the future, we should be comfortable asking for changes to be reverted if they cause disruptive breakages.  And core committers should feel empowered to do so if the tree is left in a broken state for too long.

Thanks!

Cheers,

Sander