On Sunday, 16 December 2012 at 08:30:04 UTC, Rob T wrote:
On Sunday, 16 December 2012 at 07:35:27 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
The only goal that is coming is trying to reach some level of
stability. Everything else is completely different.
There are still some clear similarities between what Debian is
doing and what I presume most people do in software development.
For the software I develop we have what is called a "live"
branch, which is the code that is in active use by our
customers. This branch corresponds to the stable branch we're
trying to achieve, and it only gets critical bug fixes until
the next major update which includes new features and/or major
adjustments as well as non-critical bug fixes. We also have a
testing branch, which includes the latest pre-release code for
the next major update. This code is running on a VM and is
tested by our customers (and the developers), under conditions
similar to "live". There's also a common "dev" branch for the
code which is in development but not yet ready for testing.
This branch corresponds to the Dev (Master) Branch, The master
branch gets updated from individual forks owned by each
developer. Coordination among developers is essential to
prevent duplications and major conflicts.
So in essence we're following a similar model to the Debian
model of (Master Dev) which is "unstable " => Pre-release
Testing => Stable.
It works great, and I see no way to remove any of the branches
without seriously compromising the end result.
For example, we can't go directly from Dev to Stable, that
would be like committing suicide. We can't use testing for dev
updates, it's too destabilizing and we'd never get a properly
tested stable release out unless all development updates were
halted for a long period of time, but then the individual forks
would pile up with major changes that would be very difficult
to sort out when merged all back together.
We need 3 common branches, and I just don't see a way out of
that.
BTW, I'm using Mercurial which has many similarities to Git.
Unfortunately I don't know my way around Git very well at this
time.
So distro's versioning system is good for a programming language
because you use it successfully in your software which isn't a
programming language (and we also don't know according to which
goal it is successful) ?
By the way, debian testing is not what you think it is :
http://www.debian.org/devel/testing.en.html
