On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 11:44 PM, Elijah Newren <new...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Felipe Contreras > <felipe.contre...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On the other hand 'gnome-2-0' is not pointing to any release, there >> where commits after the last release. So my question here is: who >> would care about those commits? They were done 6 years ago and nobody >> made a tag that contains them. The arguments I've heard apply to the >> stable releases (GEDIT_2_0_5), if somebody wants to create a GNOME 2.0 >> build, or make GEDIT_2_0_6 release, they'll probably go for the latest >> code that was actually released and used. > > I disagree; I think they'd check out the branch and use it; > particularly since that has been the practice for a number of years > now. But that's only one side of the issue, and the less interesting > one at that... > > The reason these branches were created and kept was not merely because > subversion and cvs suck and can't reasonably delete old branches. Due > to the various enterprise distributions, developers needed to continue > to apply patches and make other fixes to versions of the code that > were several years old and they were duplicating each others' work. > They had trouble discovering when others were doing similar backports > and where their work was. So there was an effort to standardize old > branch names to make it easy to know where to put their fixes, and > where other developers could go to find them; these fixes were often > not straightforward backports given the divergence of the development > branch and these old versions. (I believe it was started by an email > from Federico on desktop-devel-list, but it's been so many years that > my memory may be faulty there.) Yes, people decided that it was okay > for developers to commit their fixes without maintainer approval to > otherwise "unsupported" branches for this particular use.
+1. Luis _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list