On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 3:26 PM, Damien Katz <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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 >
I'm in complete agreement with one caveat. I would imagine that the group of people that care about a maintenance branch, and the group that pays attention to the individual commits have a relatively small overlap. If there were some mechanism that we agreed on for getting public feed back on possible maintenance patches I'd be cool. The reason I tend to worry about this is that I seem to do alot of user facing patches that I kinda waffle on whether they should be maintenance or not. A prime example would be whether patches that improve error messages should go in or not. I can see good arguments for both sides. Even something like, "submit it to the user@ for an informal vote" before putting in maintenance would be good enough for me. Paul Davis >> >> >> 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 > >
