On Friday, July 12, 2013 10:12:41 Andras Mantia wrote: > On Thursday, July 11, 2013 06:53:51 PM andrea diamantini wrote: > > What about a single official development branch? > > Just use two branches: > > - master branch (stable) > > - kdevel branch (devel) > > The natural question to come is: why isn't master the devel branch? :)
because when there is no stable branch that tracks pre-release development, the # of people testing goes down. which means there is no branch for people who would othewise like to follow development for testing purposes but who need something that is at least beta quality all of the time. that means no half-baked features or “this currently breaks X, Y and Z” commits. there is a reason we don’t have more people running master. even many KDE application developers do NOT use self-built libs, workspace or other application. with kdesrc-build, time and effort are not the problems. one reason for not self-building the libraries is to make sure their application works properly with the current stable libs. however, i know for a fact (because it’s been said to me many times by developers) that many do not use master because it is too much of a stability gamble. what it comes down to is how much we care about people who would test, document or translate our software being able to track development closer. if we don’t care much about that, then we can continue doing what we’re doing. if we do care, we ought to think of ways to make master more stable. we’ve been able to move a lot more people to testing devel for Plasma Active, for instance, since we adopted such an approach. i also think that you’ll find, if you let yourself, that with git working in branches is not only pain free but it often saves a lot of effort. many times times i’ve quickly switched to master to fix a bug without first finishing the feature set i’m working on; many times i’ve switched to someone else’s feature branch to check on progress and try things out before they are fully ready, only to then switch back to master or to my own feature branch(es) to continue my work. it’s a small change in how one works, and i know that change is hard :) .. but this one is sooooo worth it. > Ok, let me reformulate again: did we had many breakage in master the past > time that affected the official releases? Like we realized at branching > time that master is (heavily) broken and we cannot start a new release? no, we just released with breakage. or freaked out at the last moment with people predicting the sky will fall while others work their ass off to fix things. -- Aaron J. Seigo
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