Emil Dotchevski wrote:
On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 3:33 PM, Beman Dawes <bdawes@acm.org> wrote:
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.
I did not participate in the previous discussion and I'm sure there are good reasons behind the current system, but it can be argued that the new approach doesn't work very well either.
From my standpoint, it is working a lot better than the old system. While the release process may seem chaotic at the moment, this is only the second time we have used the new approach and it is already much smoother than with the first release using the new approach. It looks like we are actually going to get a release out fairly close to when it was scheduled to go out! The release team is still making improvements as we go along, too, and that should help with future releases. The time we took last release to make many reliability, reporting, snapshot, and other changes is already paying big dividends. This time we should come out of the release with better release management documentation, still more QA tools, and better scheduling. --Beman