James Sharpe 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?
These weren't my personal decisions. They were discussed at length over a long period of time to try to overcome the problems of the approach used prior to 1.35.0. I doubt you will find much support for going back to the old "wild west" trunk and then branch approach. It just didn't work for Boost. --Beman