A lighter-weight launch process for Blink

[Max Heinritz]

Hi blink-dev,

We’re going to switch to a lighter-weight launch review process. The primary difference is that web-facing API changes can now be LGTMed over email. We’ll only have meetings when issues can’t be resolved over email.

There are 5 key steps to shipping your web-facing change: 

1) Decide if it needs to go through this process.

2) Email blink-dev using the “Intent to Implement” template. Wait for LGTM from ≥1 API owner.

3) Implement your feature behind a runtime flag.

4) Email blink-dev using the “Intent to Ship” template. Wait for LGTM from ≥1 API owner.

5) Ship.

For details, see the project page and this flowchart.

Right now we have several outstanding "intent to implement" emails:

CSS Box Alignment (cbiesinger@)

IME API (kochi@)

CSS Conditional Rules (pe...@chromium.org)

Compositing and Blending in Canvas 2D (schenney@)

KeyboardEvent fields (wez@)

Rather than bring these topics to an API review meeting immediately, the API owners (CCed) will follow up on these threads within a week. If we're unable to resolve these issues over email, we'll schedule an API review meeting.

Of course, feedback is welcome, and let me know if you have questions.

Max

[Paweł Hajdan, Jr.]

On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 11:51 AM, Max Heinritz <m...@chromium.org> wrote:

We’re going to switch to a lighter-weight launch review process. The primary difference is that web-facing API changes can now be LGTMed over email. We’ll only have meetings when issues can’t be resolved over email.

Sounds good.

 

Rather than bring these topics to an API review meeting immediately, the API owners (CCed) will follow up on these threads within a week. If we're unable to resolve these issues over email, we'll schedule an API review meeting.

Of course, feedback is welcome, and let me know if you have questions.

What happens if someone on blink-dev raises concerns about the intent to implement? Does API owners' LGTM override that?

IMHO it'd be good to create a process that is open not just in the sense of visibility, but also listening to the wider community, while providing some sort of tie-breaking in case there is no consensus.

Paweł

[Adam Barth]

On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 1:02 PM, Paweł Hajdan, Jr. <phajd...@chromium.org> wrote:

On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 11:51 AM, Max Heinritz <m...@chromium.org> wrote:

We’re going to switch to a lighter-weight launch review process. The primary difference is that web-facing API changes can now be LGTMed over email. We’ll only have meetings when issues can’t be resolved over email.

Sounds good.

 

Rather than bring these topics to an API review meeting immediately, the API owners (CCed) will follow up on these threads within a week. If we're unable to resolve these issues over email, we'll schedule an API review meeting.

Of course, feedback is welcome, and let me know if you have questions.

What happens if someone on blink-dev raises concerns about the intent to implement? Does API owners' LGTM override that?

The purpose of the LGTM from API owners is to streamline the process when there's broad agreement that we should proceed.  If folks on blink-dev raise concerns, the discussion escalates to a face-to-face API review.

 

IMHO it'd be good to create a process that is open not just in the sense of visibility, but also listening to the wider community, while providing some sort of tie-breaking in case there is no consensus.

Yes, definitely.  That's one of the motivations for having these discussions on blink-dev and for keeping track of the opinion of other browser vendors and of web developers on chromestatus.com.

Adam

[TAMURA, Kent]

> 2) Email blink-dev using the “Intent to Implement” template. Wait for LGTM from ≥1 API owner.

I'd like to know whether the feature is completely invisible by a runtime flag or not. It's very important information for judgment. Would y ou add such section to the template please?

--
TAMURA Kent
Software Engineer, Google

[Darin Fisher]

Good idea!

[Max Heinritz]

>I'd like to know whether the feature is completely invisible by a runtime flag or not. It's very important information for judgment. Would you add such section to the template please?

I've added the following to the "Intent to Implement" template:

Requesting simultaneous permission to ship?

“No” means you will be implementing your feature behind a runtime flag and sending an Intent to Ship email when you're ready to enable by default. “Yes” means your change is small and you’d like to get simultaneous approval to implement and ship enabled-by-default. If “yes,” please change the title of the email to “Intent to Implement and Ship: ...”.