Re: Release branch plans

[Juanma Barranquero]

On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 00:20, Glenn Morris <address@hidden> wrote:

> The new proposal is presumably to commit everything on the trunk, and
> label those things that need to also go to the release branch in some
> way (eg "merge to emacs-24 branch"). [...]
> The log of the release branch would be essentially useless (IMO). Every
> single commit would be "merge from trunk", with very few of the merged
> commits having actually been applied.

There are commits that are only intended for trunk, and others that
are only intended for the release branch (the poster case being a bug
that it is fixed in a conservative way in the release branch and in a
more invasive, and hopefully better or more generic, way in the
trunk), so it's not really true that every single commit would be a
merge from trunk, though many (most?) would.

> So I think it would be worse than the current situation.

In absolute terms, you're right. But Eli's argument is, I think, that
the state of the trunk is more important. Having a worse trunk's
history in exchange of a cleaner release branch's history is a net
loss because we do, on the long term, orders of magnitude more work
with the trunk that the release branch. Particularly "historical
research" to determine when/how/why/by-whom an old change was done.

    Juanma