Aaron Mulder wrote:
On Fri, 27 May 2005, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
so we have /trunk and /branches/stable and /branches/unstable, the
former for release work, and the latter for really nutty stuff that
people want to work on, and head is where mainline development
continues?
Who's responsible for merging changes between branches so that
unstable gets all the changes that go into stable and trunk? That seems
likely to be painful.
We are. Stable is, well, stable, so there will be relatively few changes
made directly there (mainly bugfixes). The biggest chore will be merging
new features from (unstable,trunk) into stable as part of a new release.
For a major release, we may just say the unstable tree is now stable
and copy it over en-masse; for an incremental release we may need to merge.
Also, is the expectation that a given module only goes in one
place (so transactions, if high-quality, have source only in stable or
whatever), or is the same code in all 3 and you're just expected to know
where to work on it? If the latter, that sounds unwieldy too. If the
former, then we should just have 2 or 3 separate dirs with their own
trunk, branches, and tags, right?
Taking transaction as an example, let's say we consider it stable now.
We would have that as a module in the stable tree and the build would
output a specific version (say transaction-1.0.1). We would not need a
copy in the unstable tree, the unstable assembly could just use that
artifact.
Now, David decides to implement some new feature, he copies the stable
branch into the unstable tree and starts implementing. At some point he
wants to integrate that with the unstable assembly so updates it to use
a SNAPSHOT version of his new module. When he's done and we all agree
that this should be part of the stable build, we merge the changes back
into the stable tree and re-release (say as transaction-1.2.0). The
merge should not be too painful because there would not have been a lot
of changes in the stable tree.
If he's done, we can switch the unstable assembly back to using the new
release build and delete the transaction module from the unstable tree;
if he wants to keep working on it then we just leave it there.
The idea is to create a balance between users who want stable versions
that they can use and the desire to innovate.
--
Jeremy
