Re: CVS Code Freeze

[Derek Robert Price]

Greg A. Woods wrote:

> [ On Wednesday, April 17, 2002 at 22:55:31 (+0100), Riley Williams wrote: ]
>
> > Subject: Re: CVS Code Freeze
> > By my reckoning, that code freeze lasted an enormours 72 minutes, and
> > created a new CVS version released ready for the world to break^Wuse.
>
> Yeah, I see that.  THere was no indication though, obviously.
>
> It really would be nice if there were a longer time period to shake out
> bugs between an announcement like that and the actual release.  For
> instance the one with 'cvs log -rFOO::BAR' I mentioned the other day,
> but which Larry suggests should be fixed....  There were also recent
> changes that I for one have not even tried, let alone used for long
> enough to consider them tested well enough to be included in a release.
>
> It would also be really nice if there were a release branch for every
> release anyway.  It's not that there's likely to be any ground shaking
> changes on the trunk but still it would at least be a VERY good example
> to practice what we preach!  It would also make it much easier to manage
> and issue such things as security fixes for older releases that user
> might be reluctant to upgrade from for one reason or another.

Yeah, I almost did the tag/branch thing, but this went pretty quick and 
I was told previously that the freeze was standard procedure.  As for 
managing security fixes for old releases, all the releases are tagged, 
so we could easily branch and release such beasts if we needed to.

As for more time between announcement and release to work out bugs, to 
paraphrase Karl Fogel's book, the whole purpose of a code freeze is so 
that developers don't rush to check in last minute features and bug 
fixes before release - only fixes for fatal bugs should be checked in at 
that point.  A checkin rush can lead to more bugs.

You are right though, even with a short freeze, I should just tag it and 
announce the freeze for the "branch" only.  In the future, then.

Derek

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