Re: [boost] [git] Update submodules in boost.git

On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 11:43 AM, Andrey Semashev wrote:

On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 11:07 AM, Daniel Pfeifer wrote:

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2013/12/5 Andrey Semashev :

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On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 9:37 AM, Daniel Pfeifer wrote:

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Tests are run on Boost/develop. To make a new release of Boost, you merge the changes of Boost/develop to Boost/master.

Does that mean that X/develop is not tested?

Yes (and no). It is not integrated into Boost and it is not tested as part of Boost. The same way as the development of zlib is not tested by Debian. Just the releases are integrated and tested.

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Why is it needed then?

According to gitflow, this is where the development of X happens. It is also tested of course. On its own, however.

So this basically means that each library has to have its own testing farm, and Boost serves mostly the bundling purpose. A possible solution, I guess, but not sure such approach would be beneficial for the quality of Boost. I doubt that individual developers will be able to do the same amount of testing for their library releases as they had with svn.

Actually, thinking about it some more, this doesn't look as a good approach at all. First, the develop branch for the submodules becomes unneeded by the superproject. Individual developers may use it at their discretion but it doesn't matter in the big picture. Second, since only the master branch is tested by the test farm, it is likely that the problems will be detected only after the release of the library. In order to fix the problems, the library is bound to perform all the release cycle again. The cycle can be as small as a commit directly to the master branch (which is yet another indication that the develop branch is unneeded), but the important part is that the superproject/develop is broken until the problem is fixed. In order to release Boost we would have to stabilize superproject/develop so that it can be merged to superproject/master, and we all know from experience that such stabilization is an endless process. This was the reason why the original separation between trunk and release, where both are tested, was introduced. To me, this outcome of the suggested approach is a showstopper.