Comment by oraguy
6 years ago
That would have been fun but in reality there was no downtime. Developers like me were expected to work on two to three bugs/features at a time and context switch between them.
If I submit my test jobs today to the farm, the results would come one or two days later, so I work on another bug tomorrow, and submit that. Day after tomorrow, I return to the first bug, and so on.
How would you know that merging code from the first bugfix wouldn't break the (just tested) code from the second bugfix?? Would you assume that the first bugfix will be merged first and branch off of that?
Without knowing Oracle's approach, this sort of problem is no different from any other software, even tho it reaches a larger scale.
Branch from master, and rerun tests before the final merge, like you should in any other software? (Many processes fail that criterion, see https://bors.tech/ for something that gets this right).
Ideally you work on a different enough bug that there's limited interaction, and ideally that's figured out before you fix it, but those criteria are indeed harder to satisfy in a bigger software.
But if the time needed to test and deploy a change is so ludicrous, it seems like you'd rarely get a big-enough window to rerun your tests before the upstream changes again. Either people are merging in unstable code, or the release lifecycle is a slow byzantine nightmare too (probably the case here).
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I understand. It was partially a tongue in cheek remark :)