On Jun 1, 2009, at 3:00 PM, Chris Anderson wrote:
Devs, We've talked some about discontinuing use of svn's merge/block procedure for maintaining old release branches, in favor just asking committers to remember to put applicable patches into the 0.9.x branch.
My experience is that by default, patches shouldn't be included in branches. The point of branches is to provide a an increasingly stable code base, so that users of the branch can get updates and upgrade with little fear the update will introduce a change in behavior or regression into their production systems.
Therefore, only patches that fix serious bugs (data loss, hangs) or regressions (features that worked in previous versions no longer work) should be considered for merging. Any patch that is merged back should be justifiable as to why it's important enough to risk destabilizing the branch.
I think idea that we need to track all the patches going into trunk and the branches, because we might forget an important patch. Yes, we might forget an important patch, but then we can simply apply to the next release of the branch if its that important. Rather than track all the patches for all branches, we should rely on the community to tells us what's an important patch and what is not.
-Damien
There is discussion to be had about what patches are applicable to point release branches. Perspectives? Chris -- Chris Anderson http://jchrisa.net http://couch.io
