Lon Baker <lon@kickasspixels.com> wrote:
I'm looking down the road. As the project grows and FS becomes a critical piece of any company's infrastructure a clear distinction between "stable" and "development" branches are pretty standard in project the scope of FS.
I would rather that the developers spend time fixing bugs and implementing new features instead of backporting changes to a "stable" branch that may be very outdated. One way of managing this is the Linux kernel's model, with short development/release cycles, where there is only one branch. (There are short-lived "stable" branches as in 2.6.32.1, 2.6.32.2 etc., but my understanding is that bug fixes destined for those branches must already have been applied to the development branch destined for the next release; this minimizes back-porting of fixes.) I'm sure there are other models. My essential point is that, so far, the FreeSWITCH developers have not chosen to maintain long-lived "stable" branches, that there are alternatives to this approach, and that it has its downside, especially regarding the extra time/effort/work associated with maintaining it.