[FB] Moving Buck to a stable/development branch publication model

[gnuthor]

In order to allow us to experiment on fundamental changes to the core of Buck, future changes made by Facebook’s Build Infra team to the Buck code base will be published to a development branch. The current master branch is moving to a stable role that doesn’t automatically get these changes.

For this stable master branch we will continue to merge PRs and help with issue tickets as we do now, we are also open to pulling interesting commits from the dev branch on demand.

We will make sure that changes to the new dev branch continue to pass Buck’s test suites inside FB’s internal CI system while we change features and APIs, potentially breaking backwards compatibility. Our goal is to be able to put the buck dev code base into a state that allows easier reuse and evolution of interesting parts quickly without putting non-FB users of buck at risk that might be dependent on some of these code paths.

Longer term this ability to move fast and experiment will lead to a vastly improved build experience. We're exploring changes that will make for a more dynamic, more incremental, and much, much faster build system. We will clearly separate the core from the language rules providing the community a more stable API to depend on.

The Facebook Build Infra Team

[shepting]

What are the plans for pushing the development changes back to master? Will that happen on a semi-regular schedule? Just for major changes when they are done? Or is that even part of the plan?

[Daij-Djan]

how do PRs make it into the DEV Branch?
Is DEV rebased on master at times? or do you cherry pick Commits?

[gnuthor]

We only plan to cherry-pick changes from the development branch to master. We expect the changes in development to break existing setups, so merging them back to master too soon would be harmful. It is likely the development branch will eventually become a future version of Buck. We welcome patches to both development and master, but encourage users to stick with master for now.

[popeye8777]

What are the plans for pushing the development changes back to master? Will that happen on a semi-regular schedule? Just for major changes when they are done? Or is that even part of the plan?

I don't know I'm know to these codes

[dulmandakh]

There is an update https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2021/07/01/future-of-buck/

[vultix]

@dulmandakh Is there any news on the buck rewrite? I'm having trouble finding an update. Last I can find is the blog post saying this:

We are planning to have this publicly available by January 2022

[cjhopman]

The buck rewrite has been available for a bit now at https://github.com/facebook/buck2

We've just publicly announced it today, you can read more here: https://engineering.fb.com/2023/04/06/open-source/buck2-open-source-large-scale-build-system/

The docs available at https://buck2.build/ also have a lot of information.