* Gary V. Vaughan wrote on Tue, Aug 23, 2005 at 04:03:20PM CEST: > Albert Chin wrote: > >On Tue, Aug 23, 2005 at 08:11:48AM +0200, Ralf Wildenhues wrote: > >> > >>So my point is: get HEAD stable now, then branch off and make 2.59/1.9.6 > >>compatible there. Then bootstrap the release with the couple of naughty > >>system-dependent fixes we know of in those autotools versions. > > > >Seems fine to me. > > I'm still uncomfortable with this, because we have been commiting > patches to HEAD that were deemed too destabilizing for branch-2-0, > and I (for one) don't remember what they were...
Surely there are a few patches which seemed unsafe and a few features we still might want to change. The first have had quite a bit of testing exposure. We can mark a couple of the second experimental and bound to change. > We have things backwards right now. We should be working on getting > branch-2-0 stable right now, and forward porting any patches generated > in so doing to HEAD. The only reason things have tilted the other > way recently is that we have both been working on big patches that > were easier to verify by adding tests to the new testsuite. > *Conceptually*, even these big patches are for branch-2-0, we just > happened to develop them in the nicer non-frozen HEAD environment. I believe you just contradicted yourself. If you put big patches into a release branch, you're by definition _not_ stabilizing it! More to the point: both the recent commits to HEAD as well as their backports to branch-2-0 will most likely introduce new bugs, huge as the patches are! I'm especially afraid of the bugs introduced by the backporting process. Now, our branch-2-0 testsuite is much inferior, so it's less likely to _find_ some of these bugs. Add to that the fact that I for one do not know of one single bug present in HEAD but not in branch-2-0. This is why I would branch the next stable off of HEAD. And I wouldn't do it _yet_, but only when all known regressions from HEAD are fixed and we can start undoing whatever made CVS Autoconf/Automake necessary. And when we finally do that, we have a chance to *really* make it a couple of weeks (2!) from branching to releasing an alpha, and then 2 more to releasing. Remember that we agreed once that a stable branch per definition should not need to see any increases in the serial number of the m4 macro files? This was a prerequisite to having the stable branch not overtake another development branch. This was one reason I have rejected all interface changes to branch-1-5. For example, with branch-2-0, we cannot hold this promise any more and at the same time get our current changes backported. Cheers, Ralf _______________________________________________ http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/libtool
