on Fri Jul 11 2008, "vicente.botet" <vicente.botet-AT-wanadoo.fr> wrote:
"James Sharpe" <james.sharpe@gmail.com> wrote:
Beman,
I'm calling into question the decisions you've made with regards to where you start a new branch for a release from in the light of the fact that you are diffing against trunk. To me it seems like you are making a lot of work for yourself and maintainers by requiring that changes get merged from trunk to release, with release having been based upon the previous release. If you're only then going to diff against trunk for differences then why not just start from trunk in the first place and revert commits that are destined for the next release? Seems to me like you'd have a much easier job and people wouldn't need to worry so much about merging before the deadline; all they'd have to ensure is that there changes are in trunk before the release branch creation date and then it would simply be a case of reverting features that aren't destined for the release. I think this would be a smaller workload for creating releases, as then the remainder of the time can be spent patching the release to remove regressions.
What are people's thoughts on the matter?
Hello,
I thought this was already the case. To me this is the natural way. Developements that do not pretend to be included in the next release should be done on a separate branch or on the sandbox.
Yes, that is "standard practice." But standard practice for projects that care about stability is also that failures are not allowed to persist on the trunk. Speaking only for myself here, it seems like we can't get people to operate that way; a really stable trunk, and development on branches just don't seem to be in our culture as a group. That's why I think we're maintaining a separate stable release branch. So you can think of "release" as "trunk" and "trunk" as an experimental integration branch where the latest of everything can be tested for harmonious coexistence, I think what we're doing begins to map more closely onto standard practice. The only remaining strange thing is that we never branch for release. Instead, point releases, if they happen, will be created on new branches spun from a previous release tag.
Once a release branch is created, the trunk should be free for new libraries, and new developements for the next release. In this way the delay of a release is 6 months, but a new release is delivered every three months. This avoid to have libraries that use something from the truck that will not be merged on the release branch. Of course the modification done on the release branch must be merged on the trunk.
What is the interest to have two branches trunk and release if its contents must be synchronized?
I am frankly not sure why Beman is inspecting the differences; it was my presumption that we could do development in trunk without worrying about it, because the release branch is explicitly separated. -- Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com