Re: [wildfly-dev] Policies for merging PRs on master

As suggested by Brian, I'd like to draw attention to the discussion on https://github.com/wildfly/wildfly/pull/10604 . The PR is an upgrade of the webservices stack, including JBossWS, Apache CXF, JAXB-RI and JAXB API. In particular, the JAXB upgrade is for EE8 and better JDK 9 compatibility. Now, due to the upgrade of the JAXB API spec jar, the PR is essentially stalled since 20 days; the new spec is released as an alpha (as it's been tested within JBossWS only) and that does not satisfy a rule that requires any artifact being pulled to be Final. We're talking about a spec jar, we could simply re-tag that as Final, chances are we won't need changes any time soon there anyway, but as Tomaz pointed out, in principle that would be dishonest.

While I see the point in requiring that only sufficiently stable upgrades are applied to the codebase, I'm wondering whether, maybe, we're going a bit too far with the rules. Brian wrote on this topic: "how to determine that something is good enough to go in without using master as a test bed" ?