Additional Labels for Backport Work

[Mario Torre]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 11:45 PM Langer, Christoph
<christoph.langer at sap.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> > For an 8u backport set the fixVersion to 8-pool to have hg updater resolve
> > the issue. This should be standard practice for all bugs/backports in update
> > releases. Always set fixVersion to X-pool unless you know for sure what
> > release you need it to go into and are requesting that the fix should be
> > included in the release in the rampdown phase.
>
> One thing to add here: Unfortunately 8-pool doesn't work for openjdk8* releases. I think there's still an issue in hgupdater.  It works for, e.g. 11-pool.


The problem is that it is usually difficult to organise work by just
the labeling system, especially with this quite high rate of bugs
we're backporting (incidentally, do we really need all of them?), I'm
often unsure what I should do myself and in more than a few instances
I found out that someone what working on the same backport just after
the facts.

The new labels Andrew proposes may mitigate this, but directly
assigning a bug to someone is a better and more scalable way, imho.

> I also think that using manually created backport bugs will lead to quite some orphans... In most cases it's better to let hgupdater create the backport bug at the time of pushing.

We could fix hgupdater to do what we need I think, it shouldn't be
much of a problem. Also, what do you mean by "will lead to quite some
orphans", as in bugs getting duplicated because the updated creates an
automatic backport bug and then only one fixed? Again, in that case we
could adapt hgupdater to not create bugs, but 8-pool/11-pool trick
does make sense to me (more than the labels).

It may also obsolete all those weird labels like "redhat-interest" or
"amazon-interest" etc.. that I always found quite... ehm, interesting?
:)

I have the impression we are using labels because we're hacking around
the process, but we could make the process just a bit more fluent.


Cheers,
Mario

--
Mario Torre
Associate Manager, Software Engineering
Red Hat GmbH <https://www.redhat.com>
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