5. Development Process¶

The Ferrocene toolchain is a complex codebase that contains inputs from different teams and upstream sources. Ferrocene developers need to ensure that all changes made to it are properly reviewed, are of adequate quality, and can be properly assessed through automated testing.

This section describes the process for merging any change into the Ferrocene codebase while accomplishing the aforementioned goals. It applies to both code changes and documentation changes.

5.1. Merge Requirements¶

There are four requirements for merging any change into the main and release/* branches of the Ferrocene GitHub repository:

All changes must be proposed through a PR on the Ferrocene GitHub repository.
At least one independent Ferrocene Reviewer must have approved the latest revision of the code change and there must be no requests for changes. Positive reviews for older revisions do not count. The following screenshot shows PR approval:
The full set of tests run by CI must pass on the merge commit between the PR and the base branch. The merge commit must be the one being fast-forwarded on the base branch. Testing a merge commit and then merging into the base branch with a different merge commit (for example if other changes were merged in the meantime) does not count.
All changes deemed major must have an approved FD, and must adhere to the proposed solution outlined in the FD. See Dev Phase 1: Ferrocene Design (FD) Document Approval for more information about FDs.

An independent Ferrocene Reviewer is any Ferrocene developer who has not committed code as part of the change being reviewed. The only exception occurs for automated PRs pulling code from upstream. In those cases, any Ferrocene developer is considered as an independent Reviewer, even if they contributed to the changes in the upstream Rust project that are being merged. This is acceptable since we can take credit from the upstream review process, which establishes confidence in the code.

5.2. Merge Strategy¶

To avoid merge complications, the Ferrocene CI infrastructure uses a merge queue to only test and merge one batch of PRs at a time. Whenever a Ferrocene developer indicates that a PR is ready, the PR is placed into the merge queue. A bot then takes one batch of PRs, merges all of them together with the main branch into a single merge commit, and runs the full test suite on that merge commit. Only one batch at a time is tested so every change is fully tested against the most recent main branch.

This strategy also applies when merging changes to release/* branches. Once the backport PR is approved, a bot will follow the aforementioned steps to ensure the batch is fully tested against the release/* branch to be updated.

5.3. Development Phases¶

5.3.1. Dev Phase 1: Ferrocene Design (FD) Document Approval¶

To ensure adequate quality, changes that are deemed major by the authors or reviewers need to have a Ferrocene Design (FD) document written, approved and merged before development can begin.

Whether a change is deemed major is at the discretion of the Ferrocene developers and reviewers assigned to the task. Still, any member of the Ferrocene team can ask for a change to be deemed major (and thus require an FD), even if the developers and reviewers decided it was minor.

FDs must be sent as a PR to the ferrocene/designs repository, following the instructions, guidelines and templates present there. An FD must be approved by at least another member of the Ferrocene team without any concerns.

Once the FD has been approved or merged, or if a change was not deemed major, Dev Phase 2: Code Development can begin.

5.3.2. Dev Phase 2: Code Development¶

During this phase, one or more Ferrocene developers work in a branch, both locally and in the Ferrocene GitHub repository. The branch can be called anything except the following:

main
release/*
automation/*
trying
staging

To avoid conflicts, it is strongly recommended that the main developer for a branch adds a prefix to the branch name unique to them (like pa- or skade-).

Each time a new commit is pushed to the Ferrocene GitHub repository, the Ferrocene CI infrastructure runs a subset of the test suite as part of the commit workflow. These checks are not meant to provide any assurance on the commits being tested, rather they serve as an aid for the Ferrocene developer to catch the most common mistakes before and during code review. For further details, see Build and Test Phase 1: Spot Testing.

Once active development is done, a PR is opened and this initiates Dev Phase 3: Code Review.

5.3.3. Dev Phase 3: Code Review¶

During this phase, the latest commit of a PR must receive a positive review through GitHub Reviews by an independent Ferrocene Reviewer, and there must be no outstanding request for changes.

Any code change pushed after a positive review invalidates the assessment and demands that the code be reviewed again. Outstanding requests for changes must not be automatically dismissed on code push. It is possible for a Ferrocene developer, other than the original Reviewer, to dismiss it manually in the case that the person who left the request for changes is unavailable for a followup review (e.g. if they’re out of office). Before dismissing the request, the Ferrocene developer is required to ensure that the concerns raised were adequately addressed.

During this phase, CI performs quick checks on the pushed code as part of the commit workflow and the PR author can opt to run the full test suite by sending a command to the merge bot before the approval. When the command is sent, CI will perform the same checks it would perform before merging the PR but without performing the merge.

This can be done in the event that the Ferrocene developer wants to run the full test suite before the PR is approved in order to ensure that the PR will pass the test suite ahead of the review.

Once the commit workflow successfully executes and the necessary positive approval is left by a Ferrocene Reviewer, any Ferrocene developer can send a command to the bot to queue the PR for Dev Phase 4: Queue.

5.3.4. Dev Phase 4: Queue¶

While the PR is in the queue, no new commits should be pushed as any new push will automatically move the PR out of the queue and back to Dev Phase 3: Code Review. The PR is also removed from the queue if any merge conflict arises during this phase to avoid wasting CI time with a broken PR.

Once it is the PR’s turn to be tested, either as standalone (if the queue is otherwise empty) or in a batch (if multiple PRs are waiting to be merged), the PR goes to Dev Phase 5: Test.

5.3.5. Dev Phase 5: Test¶

Once it is a PR’s turn to be tested, the commits in the PR are merged with the latest commit from the main branch. That merged commit is then pushed to the staging branch. This triggers the full test workflow, which executes the full set of tests to ensure the merge commit does not have issues. For further details, see Build and Test Phase 2: Full Build and Test.

If the full test workflow executes successfully, the merge commit is fast-forwarded to the main branch and a new PR is pulled out of the queue to be tested.

If the workflow fails, the current PR is moved back to Dev Phase 3: Code Review.

5.4. Integrating Upstream Changes¶

Every day, the Ferrocene CI infrastructure detects changes made in the upstream GitHub repository, then checks whether the changes would produce a merge conflict if merged into the Ferrocene main branch. If no issues are found, the Ferrocene CI infrastructure creates a PR with those changes. The goal is to stay consistent with upstream to integrate the latest bug fixes and features.

The Ferrocene CI infrastructure is configured to avoid considering changes that are not relevant to Ferrocene, such as the CI configuration of upstream.

Any Ferrocene developer can then approve the PR and instruct the Ferrocene CI infrastructure to merge it into the Ferrocene GitHub repository. Note that Ferrocene developers do not perform manual code reviews on the changes, on the assumption that upstream processes ensure the correct level of quality.

5.5. Patch Reversion¶

If a patch needs to be reverted, a Ferrocene developer first creates a GitHub issue for the problem, and then performs a git revert manually, which creates a change PR. From there, the PR is considered to be in Dev Phase 3: Code Review.

After the patch is reverted, GitHub change tracking is used to determine the current status of a branch after the change.

The GitHub issue is used to track the analysis performed by either the original author of the patch or the Release Manager, post mortems and conclusions, and any additional tests introduced to prevent future recurrences of the problem.