Re: New process of getting changes into the commitfest app

<copy pasting Jacob Brazeal's full response to the original version of
this email here, to keep the discussion in one thread>

On Thu, 23 Jan 2025 at 01:25, Jacob Brazeal <jacob(dot)brazeal(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>>
>> Magnus wants reviews before deployment to be required, in an effort to
>> get as close-to-perfect commits as possible. I, on the other hand,
>> think that the benefit of close-to-perfect commits is not worth the
>> delays in deploying that those reviews currently introduce. I'd rather
>> deploy code more often to get feedback from users, and make quick
>> improvements/fixes based on that feedback. (this "deploy early, fix
>> quickly" approach is also what's being done for cfbot repo and I
>> haven't heard any complaints about it)
>
>
> Perhaps we could de-risk this change by adding some automated tests in CI. I'm happy to help with this effort.

Yeah, some automated tests would be great.

>> "Big" changes should bake in the staging environment for at least a week.
>
>
> Would we allow the staging and production branches to diverge very much? I think the value for automated testing would increase in this case.

Yeah, that's a great question. My suggestion would be to have the prod
branch simply be a delayed version of the staging branch. So basically
the flow for normal changes would be:
1. Create a PR
2. Get reviews and address those
3. Get approval.
4. Change gets merged to the staging branch (using a squash commit or rebase)
5. Staging branch gets deployed to staging server
6. Wait a week if the PR was "Big"
7. Staging branch gets merged into prod branch using a fast-forward-only merge
8. Prod branch gets deployed to prod server

Any problems found on staging would be solved by additional
commits/PRs, not by amending commits+force-pushes. That way new
contributions can always be based on the staging branch. A benefit of
this is that contributors will then automatically do some additional
local testing of changes that are on staging, but not yet deployed to
prod.