Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Making microbranches popular

[David Allouche]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 11:46:14AM -0500, Aaron Bentley wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-01-22 at 11:03, James Blackwell wrote:
> > 
> > 2. If only version-0 has a Seal: line in the patchlog, but we were at
> > version-6, would that mean we'd have to get all of the patchlogs and
> > then go back 6 patchlogs to look to see if Seal: is there?
> 
> If only version-0 has a Seal: line, then you'd only have to get
> version-0's patchlog, not version-1, version-2, etc.  That's assuming
> the seal type never changes.
> 
> I think that there might be circumstances when you'd want to cycle a
> released branch, so probably the seal type should be changeable.

That's a question I have been asking myself.

In my perception, sealing is a tool intended to serve a given number of
well defined policies. You are not obliged to conform to these policies,
but tla has some explicit support for them.

What made my balance tilt in favor of "seal type never change" is that
if you use sealing for released branches, the versionfix number is an
important information: frob-1.2.3 is at
frob--release--1.2--versionfix-3.

Cycling a released version breaks the policy it intended to support in
the first place, so it is reasonable not to support it. If you want to
cycle a released version, use whatever release versioning system is
advocated by those who say that sealing is obsolete and too limited.

Limited sometimes is a feature, KISS.

-- 
                                                            -- ddaa