Repository maintenance

[poonkuzhali]

Hello,

Can anyone provide any tips, information or best practices on how to maintain the code repository?

We are using this repository and customized it for our use case. But the problem is , the original Microsoft repository keeps getting new features and updates constantly. It is hard to replicate the changes. Any feedback on how others are doing it will be highly appreciated.

[pamelafox]

That's a great question for the community :) When we make changes, I try to keep in mind "mergability", to minimize merge conflicts for developers who are rebasing from main, but that's not always possible.

If you aren't already, make sure you're subscribed to the "Releases" for this repo, since that's a way you can get notified of major changes without having to see every little issue/PR that comes in. You can go to "Watch" menu, select "Custom" at bottom, then select "Releases".

[poonkuzhali]

Thank you so much!

[gaborvar]

Same here. I am trying to leverage this great code base. It really deserves proliferation across the community but sometimes it is hard to fit my stuff into it. Specific example: #2341 (comment)

On a broader note, transparently allowing unused but existing features of the underlying platform (LLMs in this case) to surface to the developer is an important aspect of the issue you brought up. Some merge conflicts are due to workarounds each of us needs to implement in the codebase to unlock our scenarios, and they may conflict if someone else resolves it differently.

It is hard to assess which updates are for particular use of a single contributor and which open up reuse opportunity by others. For example, I needed session state to be maintained across subsequent calls on the backend. The code base provides this mechanism except for a single element of the whole roundtrip: chatapproach.py omits to pass on the state parameter that is preserved by all other calls in the chain across frontend and backend. I fixed it for myself but I am unsure if others would value the fix. If others fix the same issue differently then our code may not merge.

Related discussion of another specific feature: #2340 (comment)

In general, if you assess that others may also work on a similar update or feature that you do, seek to define a generalized subset of it and consider a pull request when ready for sharing.