Justin Clift wrote:
A Testing branch would be a place where those things could appear.
Ahhh, I get it.
You're meaning a "testing/development" branch for the STABLE code, not anything to do with the main development (i.e. OOo2 in this case) brances.
Yeah, major code rewrites would stay in OOo2. But if a feature can be "backported" to 1.x-testing without breaking things, then it could be. Joerg said Ximian has done this.
It's a different mind-set than we have at present, from the viewpoint of "STABLE releases are pretty much in stone, except for bug fixes", and "Probably best to have all development resources going into the next version product".
Yes, it is.
OOo is in a somewehat unique situation that the stable branch is (1) set in stone and (2) gets updated on an 18-month to 2-year cycle. Most projects either have a more frequent release schedule (e.g. Gnome) or are willing to see more changes in the stable branch (e.g. Linux kernel).
But I do know of another project that also has a stable branch with properties (1) and (2), and that's Debian. And I notice that Debian has a Testing branch that lies between stable and unstable. My understanding is that very few people really are entirely on the stable branch, but rather, they prefer Testing. And some people go for Unstable.
Another note: there are several distros that are based on Debian. Those distros are usually based on the Testing branch (someone correct me if I'm wrong). I'll come back to this in a sec.
Is this what Ximian are doing?
Ximian has its own "stable" branch, separate from Sun's. That branch sees more rapid progress than Sun's. New features are added, and apparently some patches are even backported from 'development'.
I suggest that one way to have a Testing branch would be to put Novell in charge of it. What they are doing with Ximian's "stable" branch roughly meets the requirements I laid out for "testing".
Now, Novell is still free to grab the Testing branch and sell it with their SUSE distribution. This is just like those Debian-based distros that decide that Debain Testing is stable enough, and that the new features are worth it.
Cheers, Daniel.
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