the branch a patch is for (was: [PATCH] Testsuite: ensure verbose printing of captured stderr.)

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Stefano Lattarini wrote on Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 01:36:01PM CEST:
> At Saturday 12 June 2010, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > This is ok for maint, except that cscope.test does not exist on
> > maint. I folded the patch below into it, committed on maint, and
> > commited a separate patch for cscope.test in your name to
> > dr-cscope, and merged that into master again.
> 
> I usually get Git generate patches against latest master branch:
>   $ git format-patch origin/master
> but I see that this might be problematic sometimes.  Am I doing 
> something wrong, or is this simply something we have to live with?

You are doing nothing wrong: you produce patches for master, which is
usually the right thing to do.  I may decide, however, that some patch
would be nice to have in the next 1.11.x stable release, too, and not
just in the master branch.  In that case, I apply it to my (currently
unpublished) maint branch and see what happens.  :-)

For new feature development that may require a number of interrelated
patches, we may decide to put them in a topic branch first.  In that
case, patches that belong to that feature should go on top of the topic
branch.  A topic branch fully merged to master can usually receive a
merge from master, when new topic developments require new feature that
are in master only.

> Moreover, is the layout/organization of git branches in the Automake 
> main repository something a contributor should be aware of?

Good question.  I think it depends upon how involved you want to be.
In an earlier mail today I asked you about whether you wanted to also
push patches yourself (rather than me applying them from your mails).
If you want to do that, I think it would be good if we used branches
in a consistent way.  If not, then there is less need to do so.

For patches that are obvious candidates for branch-1.11 also, you could
create them on top of maint if you like.  But so far it hasn't been a
big problem either way, so you can also just continue the way you've
done so far.

I will push my maint branch now, however, to make it public.

> P.S. Sorry that I forgot to update the copyright years in the modified 
> scripts :-(

Oh, don't worry.

Cheers,
Ralf