On Jul 11, 2008, at 12:57 PM, James Sharpe wrote:
2008/7/11 David Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com>: [SNIP]
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.
Indeed, I understand that he is making sure that developers have merged changes they intended to merge; as I know a number of them missed the official merge cutoff date, but again learning from the kernel release process, the equivalent 'merge window' caught out some developers initially but they were strict about it; I think that boost should take a similar stance since the developers learnt that they had to get their changes in during the window or wait for the next release, and once the momentum of releases picked up this was less of an issue. It also has helped with maintaining stability; since developers will tend to concentrate on working towards a particular release; if you know your changes are going to take slightly longer to develop then you target the next release, and by using DVCS this is easily done and doesn't ever create any confusion as the developer maintains his/her branch until its ready for integration upon which point a integration request is made and either further, wider testing occurs or it gets merged into the next release.
What's the obsession over a DVCS? Wouldn't any VCS that supports branching (and merging), like our current Subversion, be sufficient? -- Daryle Walker Mac, Internet, and Video Game Junkie darylew AT hotmail DOT com