Re: Build sheriffs for GNOME

[Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org>]

On Sat, 2016-01-23 at 03:14 +0900, Tristan Van Berkom wrote:
> I do not support the vague notion that a "sheriff" can come along and
> revert an entire branch I've just landed which changes the API
> contract
> early enough in the release cycle for depending modules to catch on
> and
> adapt to.

Ah, yeah, we should not be reverting entire large sequences of
commits... I agree that would be excessive. In cases like this, we can
tag your module in Continuous and branch it in jhbuild, until other
modules have caught up with your API changes. Build sheriffs should try
the least-disruptive option possible to get things fixed.

In practice, I don't think this is very often an issue; usually it's
just little things that break. The most recent example comparable to
your scenario would be grilo-3.0. In such cases, it usually makes more
sense to tag/branch the module that broke API for a bit, or to try
fixing the build in the affected modules.

Michael