On 13 mrt 2011, at 05:17, Evan Schoenberg, M.D. wrote: > On one hand, if merges were Really Easy even with large changes, I would > propose the following. I thought this possibility through prior to my initial > email in this thread: > 1. Continue work on fb-xmpp for Adium 1.4.2. > 2. Merge this when complete to Adium 1.5. > 3. Feature-freeze Adium 1.5. > 4. Converge; and prepare for beta > 5. Branch when 1.5b1 is released. Expect minimal 1.5.x releases, as we have > with 1.4. > 6. Trunk becomes 1.6hg, which is 10.6+. > > The problem with this series of steps is that Apple has dealt a hand to > developers in which supporting 10.5 – or supporting PPC – means using > outdated tools and technology. Until step 6 is done, anyone who chooses to > install the primary distribution of Xcode is unable to contribute to Adium > (or even to build from source). We have to ask any potential contributor to > download a 4.4 GB installer (xcode 3.2.6) and install the 11.9 GB > distribution as a simple prerequisite to participating. > > Large feature branches are only sustainable if the trunk from which they > branched stays grossly similar. If we were to branch 1.5 at this point > (maintaining, for a time, adium-1.4, adium-1.5, and adium which would be > 1.6hg), we'd end up with increasingly complex merges as 1.5 and 1.6 rapidly > diverged. > > The outpouring of responses from developers in this thread shows the > enthusiasm at being able to use modern tools and tech.
Hey all, Although I'm a bit late to this discussion, there are still two points I'd like to mention: - XCode 4 feels rather buggy for me. Maybe I should get used to it a bit more, but I'd rather keep using XCode 3 for a while. I don't know how well the backwards compatibility is this time, but I remember it was horrible for XCode 2 -> XCode 3. Considering that, and the €3.99 price tag, I think quite a lot of potential contributors will still be using XCode 3. The same argument also goes the other way: we don't want to require people to download an additional 5GB and spend €3.99 to be able to build. - Just because it won't be committed to trunk doesn't make it impossible to work with blocks, or new APIs in general. I myself have been working with a fork on bitbucket on using libdispatch for libpurple's eventloop and message view's message queues. I know this won't be pushed to trunk any time soon (if it ever will), but I don't care. Keeping this limited to feature branches makes it a lot easier to merge them back in, contrary to keeping up a "adium-1.4", "adium-1.5" and "adium-1.6". Also, that leaves the responsibility of the merge to the person working on that fork. So, while I do agree dropping 10.5 would have advantages, and I don't really see the need to keep it around until Lion "just because", I'd rather not make this switch ASAP. Thijs
