Re: stable branch release policy [was Re: Possible bug in intersect]

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 2:42 PM, Thomas Weber
<address@hidden> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 09:19:14AM +0200, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 1:09 AM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
>> > On 12-Apr-2009, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
>> >
>> > | I think the correct policy would be *regressions only*, as has been
>> > | suggested by John, but I don't think that's what most users expect.
>> > | That would likely require more frequent stable branches.
>> >
>> > I'd like to have this as well, but to make it work, I think we will
>> > need to have some additional structure in the way we work with the
>> > main development tree.  I'd be happy to use something like the stages
>> > used in GCC development.  I can't remember the details and can't check
>> > at the moment, but the idea is to have a feature freeze and reduce the
>> > number of important regressions to zero some time before a release.
>>
>> The problem with the "feature freeze" state is that it, IMHO, should
>> not make the development cease.
>> If we enter the "feature freeze" state, no bugs seem to occur that are
>> *in my scope* of interest (which may still mean there are bugs and
>> thus the freeze may last for a long time), I would like to continue
>> development of other features (perhaps for next release), and I would
>> like to do so in a public repo, so that others may clone and build
>> without annoying digging patches from mails. Also, I sometimes want to
>> access the repo from multiple machines.
>> As I explained numerous times, continuing a parallel development
>> without allowing merges is painful, because you need to repeatedly
>> rebase your patches (or fold them), and sometimes even repeatedly fix
>> conflicts.
>> Taking partially inspiration from Mercurial (which however has more
>> active developer community),
>> I propose the following:
>>
>> 1. The savannah archive will become the "stable" repository.
>> 2. We create an "experimental" (or better name?) repository, probably
>> using Thomas Weber's hosting.
>
> That would be possible.
>
> That said, I don't agree this is good. If the main development happens
> in the "experimental" archive, it should be hosted on octave.org or
> gnu.org, next to the current archive.
>

If multiple repos can be hosted on savannah, that would surely be
best. John, can you figure that out? I think I googled for the
possibility but found only some hints that it maybe needs to be done
manually and might not work for all VCSs.

-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek
computing expert & GNU Octave developer
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz