Bug 239126

Summary:	Reconsider branch naming conventions for pull requests
Product:	WebKit	Reporter:	Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro>
Component:	Tools / Tests	Assignee:	Nobody <webkit-unassigned>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX
Severity:	Normal	CC:	jbedard, mcatanzaro, webkit-bug-importer
Priority:	P2	Keywords:	InRadar
Version:	WebKit Nightly Build
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Bug Depends on:
Bug Blocks:	239082

Description Michael Catanzaro 2022-04-12 08:36:41 PDT

The current rules from https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/wiki/Pull-Requests say: "We suggest that pull request branch names are prefixed by eng/ or dev/ so that contributors are clear which branches contain production code when they add other user's forks as remotes." Well that works, sure: it's an easy rule, and WebKit contributors will learn to follow it quickly. But it's unclear what the benefit of this rule really is. dev/ and eng/ are not conventional: at least I've never seen them before ever, despite having used GitHub for 10 years. Normally I name my branches mcatanzaro/ to indicate they are personal dev branches and avoid clashing with others, but since WebKit requires that pull requests be submitted from forks, even that convention hardly matters for WebKit. It's unclear why there are any rules for branch naming at all. Since we disallow merge commits, the branch name should never be visible except to people who are using my personal fork as a remote.

"""
Notably, EWS is unable to apply changes which come from the branch they are targeting (ie, EWS cannot apply a change from Contributor/WebKit:main onto WebKit/WebKit:main), so in order to be reviewed, changes must come from a different branch.
"""

It seems like a strange and artificial limitation, but seems fine to restrict a source branch from being named "main" I suppose.

Comment 1 Radar WebKit Bug Importer 2022-04-19 08:37:12 PDT

<rdar://problem/91962116>

Comment 2 Michael Catanzaro 2022-05-17 06:28:36 PDT

FWIW if using 'git-webkit pr' then the branch name really does not matter, because the script creates the branch for you. So this doesn't really matter so much as I thought it would.

Comment 3 Jonathan Bedard 2022-07-01 15:02:06 PDT

The reason we suggest branch names (and they are suggestions, no requirements) is that prefixing branches makes it easy for tooling to tell which branches have uneditable history, and which ones can be rebased. Ultimately, though, these are just suggestions, not requirements.