Hi folks, * We Will Need a Branch * Now that we are close to getting past the 4.0 release, I wanted to bring up the topic of how to do bug fix maintenance for it. I think that the 4.0.1 release should stay focused on only including bug fixes. Already, I think a few too many changes have been slipping into trunk which should not be in the 4.0.1 bug fix release, so trunk could not be used to produce the 4.0.1. Clearly trunk is on already on it's way to the next 4.1 release.
* Proposed Branch * I propose that we copy the 4.0 tagged release: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/activemq/tags/activemq-4.0/activemq to: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/activemq/branches/activemq-4.0 and use that as our 4.0 stable branch which will produce the 4.0.n series of bug fix releases. If no body objects, I'll do create this branch early next week. * Bug Fix Merging?? * Also, we need to standardize how we will apply bug fixes to branches. Once we branch, when we find a bug, we will typically need to fix the bug in both the 4.0 and the trunk branch. Once school of though is apply the bug fix to the 4.0 branch and when the 4.0.1 release is done, we merge all those fixes into trunk. I'm not a big fan of that approach, I've seen it fail too many times. Reasons: - Bug fixes get done in trunk first usually. Most developers I know prefer to work in trunk: that were the cool new shiny stuff is. - Developers manually apply the fix to both the branch and the trunk. This could cause a merge conflict at the time of the merge. They do this because either they REALLY need the fix in trunk to work around something or they just didn't know that we merge fixes in to trunk on bug fix release. So I'm actually a fan of informing folks that we don't do merges on bug fix releases and that they should manually apply their patch to all the branches that they think could benefit from the fix. This has a little more up front work for the guy applying the patch (since he has to apply it to multiple branches) but I think it leads to branches that are more stable. What do you guys think? -- Regards, Hiram
