Re: New branch

[Óscar Fuentes]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

> trunk wouldn't take the role of the pending branch: it would take the
> content of the pending branch but keep its role of "where development is
> focused", so I don't think there's any problem.  It matches previous CVS
> pratice in this regard.

Well, one thing is wathever meaning you want to associate with each
branch name, and another thing is the contents of the branch.

Apart from creating confussion when the rename takes place, there are
potential problems:

First: mirrors will suddenly appear as diverged branches. Hopefully
people will know about the change in advance or come here to ask before
trying to "fix" the problem and possibly screw their setups of send
upstream a bag of garbage made of revisions from the previous branch and
merges of the new one. Automatic mirrors like the one in Launchpad will
be broken. Likewise for the setups of users who track Emacs
development. I foresee all sorts of grief and despair :-)

Second: I don't know the effects of switching the master branch in
midair for a bound branch. It would be a good thing to ask about this in
the bzr ml for knowing about potential problems.

>> In the future, I suggest creating branches with a name that conveys its
>> purpose (trunk can be the perennial development branch, then we would
>> have `emacs-XX.X', etc) and keep those names forever. This requires
>> almost no housekeeping on the developers part, except for cloning
>> emacs-XX.X when it is created, which is much simpler than adjusting
>> branch references.
>
> When I tried to do that, I bumped into the problem that I can't have
> a symlink "trunk" pointing to the "emacs-23" branch (because
> bzr.sv.gnu.org's http server doesn't honor symlinks).

I don't see how symlinks could help here.