Recommended usage of backports in JBS

[Joe Darcy]

Hi Mike

On 04/30/2014 03:55 PM, Mike Duigou wrote:
> On Apr 30 2014, at 12:40 , Joe Darcy <joe.darcy at oracle.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> It has come to my attention that there are continuing questions about policies around how to use backports in JBS. This email is intended to give guidelines on effective usage of backports and to provide a brief design rationale for the backport facility.
>>
>> By default, JIRA uses multiple values in the "Fix Version/s" field to track a bug in multiple releases.
> Can we change the default behaviour?

Certainly not easily. We looked into this during early days of JBS and 
there was no ready way to do it. If not impossible, the effort required 
was not judged worthwhile compared to other kinds of customizations we 
were working on at the time.

>
>> (It would be technically possible for a tool like jcheck to verify that a bug id corresponded to a main bug rather than a backport. As a matter of design, we have not wanted to prevent pushes from going through due to an outage of the bug database. However, we may want to reconsider the design trade offs in this regard and perform such a check if JBS is available, but not block the push from going through if JBS happens to be down.)
> Ideally this should require a manual "--force" option.
>
> Mike

I agree that would be a good feature to have.

Cheers,

-Joe