[tbb-dev] auto-rebasing tor-browser patches on gecko-dev master

[Georg Koppen]

Nicolas Vigier:
> Hello,
> 
> A few days ago on #tor-dev:
> 
> 01:20 < mikeperry> arthuredelstein,boklm: I'm going into mozilla next
>       wednesday, and I suspect they're going to want to make progress
>       on getting our branch running in their testing infrastructure..
>       a thought occurrs: what if we were to make an auto-rebasing script
>       that periodically tries to rebase our patches on to master from
>       https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev? then we'd not only have early
>       warning if they break our new tests, but also when our patches 
>       begin 
> 01:21 < mikeperry> it may mean more work in terms of constantly fixing
>       broken patches though..
> 
> 
> I think I can do something to try to automatically rebase our patches
> on gecko-dev master, build and run the tests every night, then send an
> email if the rebase failed, the build failed, or a test that was
> successful the previous day failed.
> 
> Sometimes the auto-rebasing will fail. Maybe we can have a 'nightly'
> or 'master' branch where we push manually rebased patches when
> auto-rebasing failed ?
> 
> I don't know how often the auto-rebasing will fail, and how much work it
> will be to manually fix it though.
> 
> Does it look like a good idea ?

I think before we start with auto-rebasing at all someone should rebase
our patches to mozilla-central once as probably a lot of them are
failing if we would start with the auto-rebasing right away which would
lead to quite some noise we could avoid. Additionally, there are
probably patches that need to get rewritten to a great deal (the image
cache part comes to mind here).

This is probably already involving quite some work. Then we should come
up with a plan on what to do with broken patches. Do we fix them ad hoc
or just once every week or...? Who is going to do that? What means
"fixed" here at all? Just a successful manual rebasing or does the code
need to be compiling as well at least? If so on which platforms? Who is
organizing that?

And most importantly how do we make sure that the functionality of the
patches is still the same? I very much fear that subtle rebase problems
are carried around (see the potential DNS leakage that occurred during
the last rebase) making us think everything is fine where in reality
this is not the case.

Thus, I am currently not convinced this is a good idea at all.
Definitely not until we sort out how this should work in practice.

Georg


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