David Abrahams <dave <at> boost-consulting.com> writes:
on Wed Oct 17 2007, "Peter Dimov" <pdimov-AT-pdimov.com> wrote: [...]
This is setting us up for a fork. The trunk will drift further and further away from the release branch; if it's too hard now to reconcile trunk and 1.34, it will be even harder to do that for trunk and 1.35, and nearly impossible for trunk (if it still exists at all) and 1.36. At some point one of the two branches will be cut off and someone will suffer, no matter which branch prevails.
Interesting you should say that; Among the moderators who discussed the 1.35 release process, all but one of us was very concerned about that issue. Another problem with the drift is that the trunk very quickly becomes an invalid proving ground for a library's ability to work in context of the release branch.
I cannot think of a softer way out of this problem than the unconditional merge of the release branch on trunk immediately after the release is issued. Libraries that were merged to the release branch specifically for the current release should not differ; for the others developers should be forewarned, so that they may move their stuff to private development branches before the merge takes place. Cheers, Nicola Musatti