On Aug 20, 2008, at 1:31 PM, Beman Dawes wrote:
Daryle Walker wrote:
Gennaro Prota wrote:
****************************************************************** ** branches/release is open for merging all stable changes, including bug fixes, and major upgrades to existing libraries. Breaking changes should be coordinated with libraries affected. New libraries may be added with permission of a release manager. ****************************************************************** ** Hi Beman, Rene, Daniel, I know I should already know this, but I was completely lost in
Beman Dawes wrote: the Wiki pages. Perhaps just the stifling heat we have here. Well, I made several changes related to dynamic_bitset, in trunk, and I thought they would be (now) in the release 1.37 branch. They aren't. So, where does the release branch originate from?
It's always from the previous release. Is this a good thing? Wouldn't this mean that the releases will
On Aug 19, 2008, at 8:34 AM, Rene Rivera wrote: diverge from the trunk, increasingly so after each release? I feel that would be _very_ bad. Is there some sort of merging going on between the trunk and release (in either direction, or both)? We don't want fixes and new libraries on the trunk being missed for release.
Right. That's why the release manager runs an "unmerged changes" analysis later in the release cycle and pesters developers who appear to have been lax about merging changes.
If the trunk is kept always release-ready, then the release manager can just dump every file in without asking. It should work with only minor tweaks needed. Also, should we have so many developers potentially messing around with the merging mechanics? Maybe it'd be better to have a small group of people to the integration. This is important when we switch the Subversion server and repository format to 1.5, since an update to svn-1.5's built-in merge control requires everyone to change their client access at the same time.
Shouldn't the final form of the release workspace be merged back into the trunk (and then the branch [but not tag] deleted), and the next version's workspace branched from the merged trunk?
No. That's the "Wild West" system we used to use. It was a nightmare to manage. The new system is much better since branches/ release stays much more stable, allowing us to get releases out quarterly.
1. The "always release-ready" trunk (ARR-trunk) philosophy counters this. 2. Someone in a sub-thread branched from this one noted that the management nightmare has moved from one person to all. Instead of each developer updating his/her part of the trunk at their leisure or as needed, now _every_ developer has to do that AND be vigilant about the release branch, which is effectively a parallel trunk that constantly needs attention. This is bad since we're volunteers that come and go and your suggestion requires everyone to be like the release manager. The ARR-trunk method makes this unnecessary. With a ARR-trunk, we just branch off the trunk, do the minimal testing and fixes that were missed, and ship it. Since the fixes were supposed to be there, we can safely merge them back into the trunk, then kill the branch (after tagging it, of course). A problem from the Wild West days was letting the release branch fester for months (or year) while authors tried to get it release ready because the libraries in the trunk it branched from weren't kept (near) release ready. ARR-trunk developers can't do that because the release branch is too short-lived to be a crutch. Always basing the next release branch from the previous version is like festering by piecemeal. Another problem is that the build, documentation, and testing systems still fall apart when someone looks at them funny. Fixing (or replacing) those, especially so the processes can be as automated as possible, and therefore making the test runners' job as turn-key as possible, will provide the quicker turnarounds needed for the ARR- trunk to work. -- Daryle Walker Mac, Internet, and Video Game Junkie darylew AT hotmail DOT com