Thomas Watson wrote:
Advise from me on this topic seems a bit strange but I will give it anyway
since I have gone through this type of change to the Equinox Framework
many times ;-)
In general we (Equinox) like to do all future development directly in the
HEAD because that is thought of as the latest and greatest. For most
situations this is perfectly acceptable. But there are times where we
need to make major enhancements and code restructure. Since the OSGi
Framework sits at the bottom of everything it can become very disruptive
to make ongoing major changes to the HEAD while developing the new
feature. For these situations we usually favor a temporary branch where
we can finalize the code without worrying about breaking the world that
uses the code from HEAD. This way we can save our code while we work out
the details and then do a final commit to HEAD once it is ready. We
usually do not like to work in a temporary branch for more than a couple
of weeks to reduce the amount of merging. We do nightly builds from HEAD
and usually like the builds to be somewhat usable. It is not acceptable
for us to go more than a few days with broken code in a N-Build. This
means our code in HEAD cannot remain half-baked for long periods of time
(> 3 days would be unacceptable). Not sure if any of this can be applied
to Felix, but thought I would share my point of view. To me it all
depends on how many developers use the code from your main code stream.
Well, by that standard, I would have to do a temporary branch, since I
could not guarantee only a few days of breakage...
As I said originally, I was leaning toward a temporary branch... I can
probably minimize some of the branching by doing as much as I can in
trunk. I could even do the work side by side using a different file, but
at that point it seems like I might as well branch.
Thanks for the input, Tom.
Tom (that Equinox guy)
Shouldn't that be, "that other Equinox guy" ? ;-)
-> richard
"Richard S. Hall" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
12/18/2006 09:09 AM
Please respond to
felix-dev@incubator.apache.org
To
felix-dev@incubator.apache.org
cc
Subject
Re: Branch or not?
Marcel Offermans wrote:
I agree with Felix and Karl to do the changes in HEAD now. Of course,
you should always commit code that at least compiles, but HEAD is
meant for development, not for taking daily snapshots of release
quality.
Well, I would expect all changes to compile, since it is doubtful I will
commit something that wouldn't compile. I was more thinking about
breaking existing functionality. The overall time frame could be a
couple of weeks from when I start, depending on how much time I have to
focus on it.
I can always hold off committing until I have it mostly working, but I
wanted to try to avoid the "big bang" approach.
We should define the goals for the next release (assigning JIRA issues
to the next milestone) and then start working on them.
Agreed. We did that for the 0.8.0 release and we have already started
for the 1.0.0 release. For me, we have two main targets for 1.0.0:
1. Require-Bundle
2. Security
I will add require-bundle to the 1.0.0 release in JIRA...I will let Karl
look at the security-related JIRA issues and add the ones that he thinks
are appropriate.
Other people should speak up if they want to voice an opinion about
specific issues that we should address and/or chip in.
-> richard
