CI Reactor 2.0.2 is a disaster

[eluser]Phil Sturgeon[/eluser]
I'd like to be the first to say - it was a disaster.

2.0.2 is a mess for several reasons, but it cannot be put entirely on the shoulders of the Reactor team. Myself and Eric have been working on Reactor a fair amount while Kenny and John have been putting the hours in on GetSparks.org, which while it is not a direct part of CI will benefit us all greatly.

Now, the Cache library is broken on case-sensitive environments. Check, we have that fix done. That was an error I introduced when trying to make extending packages work, and fixing the fact that packages do not actually support the CI_ prefix. This meant the Cache class was causing all sorts of conflicts. A pretty complicated issue to sort out, but it worked fine with all the tests I ran on my case INSENSITIVE AMP stack.

As for the CSRF issue that was actually an error introduced by the Core team. They made some fields protected but didn't update the references to them in the form_helper (I'm looking at you Greg!). This was not an issue until the Core team ran their emergency merge of Core into Reactor and published the latest version without any warning. I only found out about 2.0.2 on the way back from the pub when I saw someone tweeting it!

What is the cause of these problems? Well, testing sucks plain and simple. The main problem here was that we had put a few new features into BitBucket only a day before. Normally there are a bunch of developers who are using the tip who can tell us when something new breaks a feature, but this 2.0.2 emergency release was banged out so quickly that nobody ever had a chance.

So what should we be doing? Using a shitload more branches. If this was Git I would be ramming Git-Flow down everyone's throat, but we're using Hg. For a while I've been saying that Hg had terrible/weak branching but it turns out I was just uneducated on the matter. Derek Jones has written a great article on the matter and we'll be folloing this in the future.

Essentially it will mean that new features go in one place and bug fixes happen in another. This will in turn means that if the Core team need to bang out a hotfix release for whatever reason, then they can do so without any new features (from the Reactor team OR the Core guys) causing problems. We've all been a bit slack and we know how to improve it. This is still a very early stage in the game.

Update: Can we all stop going on about Fuel? I am the only one of the team who works on that and recently I've had a very minor role. I've actually been working my ass off on putting CICON2011 together. Tickets on sale next week.

Also, fair play on patwork. He has expressed his concerns and done something about it. His bug fixes have been merged and CI is back on track. Let's not just sit around complaining about things guys. Developer13 and InsiteFX: I don't think you have sent a single pull request.