Topic branches

[Ludovic Courtès]

Andreas Enge <address@hidden> skribis:

> On Sun, Sep 01, 2013 at 09:40:27PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> Speaking of which: in the future, we should use topic branches for such
>> things, to avoid disrupting the main branch.  For instance, I’ve locally
>> switched back to Python 2 as the default since I was otherwise unable to
>> use the QEMU-related things.
>> 
>> Actually it’s not too late: we could create a new branch off ‘master’,
>> and just switch back to Python 2 as the default on ‘master’.  Hydra can
>> be told to build the new branch in addition to ‘master’.
>
> Actually, 77c7f8f41b558bab13690c843068af8ba996e5bf switches back (while
> keeping the definition of Python 3 in the variable python-3; but all
> packages using python as input will get Python 2).

Ah right, thanks!

> We could create branches; very often (like here, with changes to the python
> build system pending), we might as well use core-updates directly.

Experience with Nixpkgs suggests that topic branches are better:
core-updates does rebuild-the-world changes, so you don’t want to merge
it lightly, and not too often; conversely the Python changes are
relatively isolated.

More importantly, intermingling the effects of the Python changes with
that of (say) a GCC and glibc upgrade is undesirable, as it makes it
harder to determine the cause of a problem.

Thanks,
Ludo’.