I would caution that maintaining a stable branch is going to be quite challenging. All commits against trunk will fall into 3 categories:
1) clearly bug fix
2) clearly new feature
3) a mix of the two
1 can probably be easily back ported and 2 would be not but what of 3? We don't split patches/commits based on a clear split between 1 and 2 so it would be the job of the stable maintainer to figure it out, split it up and then commit just the bug fix part.
I would argue that the churn in the stable branch would be sufficient to make it a moving target just like trunk, just slower moving and one step removed from tony ensuring everything is up to his standard.
I would also argue that at some point this project will clearly go from "balls to the wall" development like now (lots of bug fixes and new features all the time) to something more sane as it matures. At some point going to stable/dev might make sense.
Another thought. Look at how the linux kernel is developed now. There is linus's branch which is essentially unstable. It is the vendor's (distro) job to pick a line in the sand and keep that kernel rev stable. There is help from people that have stepped up and maintain a "stable" kernel branch, but that has nothing to do with the mainline development.
I can appreciate the pain that some people have with dealing with production systems where you want stability above all else. In reality you don't want stability, you don't want surprising behavioral changes. You want code that doesn't change except in those areas that fix bugs in components that you use. But your component set and mine are different. Once you are accepting bug fixes for all components, the set that changes can churn quite a bit.
Anyway, just some food for thought.
I know that if I had to double commit (or at least consider double committing) every piece of code I'd get frustrated quickly.
On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 1:17 AM, Michael Jerris
<mike@jerris.com> wrote:
This seems a good time to note that we are still looking for volunteers to assist in maintaining a stable branch. I can not do this without additional volunteer resources. We have asked several times recently to fairly silent response. If anyone is interested in assisting with this effort, please contact me offlist and we can discuss further.
Mike
OK so I can sign you up for the stable team? ;) As per my previous email i'm 100% sure we would do a stable release if we had people tending to issues. The only problem is you would have to be on IRC tending to issues because if tony sees someone asking about a problem he'll be diving in to fix it before they can say "I have this one". This also means working in a similar manner we do already. Our process is very chaotic at times but it has served us well so far.
The goal is to leave Anthony alone so he can move forward and let the stable team manage the jira's and issues on the list related to stable.
/b
On Feb 18, 2010, at 10:10 PM, David Knell wrote:
Lon Baker <lon@kickasspixels.com> wrote:
The development branch is where feature requests and non-critical bugs
reports would be filed for the next production release.
The current process leaves a gap between production ready and
development code that may become greater over time.
Going against the grain here, I agree with you. The current way of
doing things is, in my opinion, not well thought through - there's no
reason to tag and release versions if the answer to any issue is 'make
current', and support is not available unless that's been done. Far
better to either have meaningful releases with stable and devel
branches, or not to have releases at all.
--Dave
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