Beman Dawes wrote:
David Abrahams wrote:
Rene Rivera wrote:
James Sharpe wrote:
What we gain is the ability to be making bug fix releases of previous versions whilst working on the next release. With the current system there is no way of doing this simultaneously, if we want a bug fix release, which I'd suggest should happen, given the demand we've seen on the list, we need a method of doing so. I 100% agree with that. Some people keep saying that. But I fail to see how the current setup
David Abrahams wrote: prevents one from doing this. The name of the branches & tags is irrelevant. They are just names! It's the content that matters.
Exactly.
And the content is exactly the same currently.
The same as what?
If there is a *release team* for doing a 1.35.1 release. It is their responsibility to create the branch for them to work on such a release. If it is a matter of policy that we want to add to the workload for library authors and maintain point releases on an ongoing basis.
Surely you don't think the purpose of doing a point release is to add to the workload for library authors? The point is to serve users who aren't prepared to accept a new major revision with all the incompatibilities that may entail, but who need bugfixes.
Then it is as simple as always creating a new branch for each major release at then *end* of said major release.
That could work too. As long as there's a way to handle it, that's fine with me. As it stands today, when a library author finds a bug that ought to be fixed in the next point release (should we decide to make one) there's no place for him to check the fix in that will guarantee that it goes into the point release.
What's wrong with branches/release as the location of the point release? Presumably developers are merging fixes there anyhow, it is being tested, inspected, and release files being built on a daily basis.
If you're suggesting that we consider some snapshot of branches/release to be a point release of each officially released version, then that won't fly at all. One of the main reasons people want a point release is so they can be sure they're accepting only minimal changes to the release they're working on: just bug fixes and that's _it_.
Of course, having testers operate on a single branch called "release," no matter how we do it, is really incompatible with the idea of testing point releases concurrently with other releases. I don't remember where anyone said we would have only *one* tested branch. Just that it would be more work on testers to have to switch on each release cycle the branch they test.
That just doesn't work in practice. Having to beg, plead, and pester testers to switch isn't a workable solution.
But you don't need to, as has been pointed out many times. Just use an svn:externals to cause a copy of the current release branch to be found under the same name. -- Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com