Henrik K wrote on 18/12/22 8:18 pm:
This is atleast third discussion of the same? All the previous times it was concluded that branching wasn't necessary. Backporting is a pain and usually something is forgotten. It's not like we have any real developing going on, does anyone even have a guess what a new big 4.1 feature would be?
I've been through the discussion about a million more times than that, essentially every time I've had a release on some project that used svn. The only thing that changes is the opinions of the developers at the time, and maybe what new work they already know is pending.
However, since those are different each time it is worth asking the question. I don't want to create a tedious discussion, just find out if there is a consensus and if there are any strong reasons for branching or for not branching right now.
Henrik, you do bring up something that I think is pretty relevant for the question of branching: Is there anything planned yet that we know would be for 4.1.0 and would not be for 4.0.1? Does anyone have anything in mind yet for future SpamAssassin, or have we all been too focused on the 4.0.0 marathon?
For any major changes that threaten stability (like our wl/bl or meta change), a temporary branch could be used for publishing things for others to test, especially if not committed to work on it actively. Pushing normal fixes or new plugins to trunk would fine. Just please, do atleast a make test before committing.
And this is what I like about working with git instead of svn. It took me a bit to get used to it, but it is so much easier to use git branches in that way. I never had to go through the team discussion on a project that used git about whether to branch or the right time to branch for developing a point release vs a major version branch, or have difficulty backporting the way it always happens with svn.
If migrating to git is "the Apache way"
I don't feel any pressure from anyone, inside or outside the PMC to switch from svn. Infra seems happy to keep running the svn servers for as long as we want to keep using them.
I do want to get a sense for how many of prefer git, how many are comfortable using git and wouldn't mind if we did switch, how many are not experienced with it or have never worked with it.
Sidney
