February 8, 2017 by Roberto Di Remigio

Branching Models and Context API

Attendees

Radovan Bast and Roberto Di Remigio

Discussion on branching models for collaborative development using Git. Based on this draft document on GitHub

Radovan’s model doesn’t have enough semantic flexibility to make clear where bugfixes should go and where functionality improvements should go. It is, however, very clear when API breaking changes happen and where these should go, relative to upstream repo and branches.
Roberto’s model has ambiguities regarding API breaking changes.
A finer grained model, synthesis of the two, has the desired semantics.

The problem comes about because the context object is just an opaque handle to a C++ object that can be vastly more complicated.
We explored the problem using valgrind and the GCC undefined behavior and address sanitizers.
Conclusion: track the initialization status of the C++ object, insert checks where appropriate and throw/abort when client tries to access the API before initialization/after finalization. This avoids having to invalidate the pointer host-side after a call to the api_delete API function.

Roberto will update the branching model document.
- Draw SVG picture corresponding to the one drawn on the board see photo
- Write down some words
- Possibly address this issue

Next meeting will take place March, 1st at 11:00 AM in Radovan’s office

CI service Draft requirements on the CI server capabilities. Radovan might have some news on a guinea pig machine.
Branching models Finalize discussion, possibly write a blog post.
Library design Radovan prepared a repository and Roberto uploaded the brainstorming document. We should move forward with this project.