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instructlab / dev-docs

Developer documents for the InstructLab organization
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Create research-branch-policy.md #112

Open mairin opened 4 months ago

mairin commented 4 months ago

Research engineers contributing to InstructLab have expressed the need for the ability to make rapid, experimental changes in a space where they can collaborate and move quickly without working through robust, production-level code review.

Software engineers contributing to InstructLab have expressed concern about allowing code into the main branch that does not meet the production-level quality standards enforced on main. We need to minimize the time from code merged into main to shipping in a release, and automating confidence in that shipment.

One of the more unique considerations InstructLab has as a project in contrast to other open source projects is the tight collaboration between research engineers and software engineers. There are cultural differences and different best practices in each discipline, and in order to enable this partnership we may need to take some new or less standard approaches to open source project management.

This devdoc proposes the creation of a policy in acknowledgement of the different ways of working inherent to the research engineer role in contrast to the production-level software engineer role. As a project, InstructLab has a goal of enabling upstream, open source collaboration between AI researchers, and this is one of the ways we can help achieve that goal.

mairin commented 4 months ago

Was there any alternative considered other than using a research branch?

Nope. Open to suggestions!

russellb commented 4 months ago

Was there any alternative considered other than using a research branch?

Nope. Open to suggestions!

I’d like to see it weighed against keeping all active development not ready for main in repo forks. We talked about this a bunch just today so surprised to see this answer?

to be fair I haven’t had a chance to read the docs itself yet given the holiday

mairin commented 4 months ago

Was there any alternative considered other than using a research branch?

Nope. Open to suggestions!

I’d like to see it weighed against keeping all active development not ready for main in repo forks. We talked about this a bunch just today so surprised to see this answer?

to be fair I haven’t had a chance to read the docs itself yet given the holiday

yes, that is the temporary solution marked in the document, which i thought we were aligned on

nathan-weinberg commented 3 weeks ago

@mairin what is going on with this?