[Monotone-devel] branch management

[Thomas Keller]

Hi all!

I appreciate that people take care about older releases and open
branches for them to backport fixes, but I think two things are easily
forgotten and should be considered by anybody touching these:

1) If a new branch is created off trunk for a patch release and you make
your first commit, its your responsibility to change the version number
to "0.<minor>.<patch + 1>dev" for mtn < 1.0. If we follow the new
proposed version numbering scheme, this would mean
<major>.<minor>.<patch>.90 for new patch versions, which eventually gets
<major>.<minor>.<patch + 1>, but I'm open for other - less ugly -
suggestions here.

2) Likewise when the first change is made, a corresponding NEWS entry
should be written, so we don't start to digg though the commit log of
the particular branch for a patch release, but have something to build upon.

3) Usually one would fix a bug in a release branch and merge it into
trunk, but this merge could bring over unwanted changes (like changes in
NEWS, configure.ac and maybe others), so the best is probably to use
pluck as most of you already did.


Now to the question which branches we really want to take care of.

Since 0.48 is quite around I think it makes sense to support this a
little longer - at least until Debian moves to a newer version - and
backport important stuff as needed.
Richard recently added the updated French translation to 0.48 (probably
because the original author created a patch against this version) and
this was already kind of a corner case, because I think we should really
try to keep calm in this area and avoid lots of work backporting
non-crucial things to older branches.
The translation update of course did not break anything for us, but I
don't know for example if Debian policies allow i18n updates at all in
the lifetime of a package and if this work is actually seen for 0.48
users. (I do think its seen otherwise the original author wouldn't have
send the patch probably, but I don't know the rules enough).

Other versions beside 0.48 are currently not quite on my agenda beside
the most recent version / branch 0.99, so again, unless people start
screaming very loud at us we should try and keep the work and ourselves
calm.

Questions / comments / clarifications? If you're ok with the things
written above, I could move them into the wiki and / or document them in
notes/release-checklist.txt.

Thomas.

-- 
GPG-Key 0x160D1092 | address@hidden | http://thomaskeller.biz
Please note that according to the EU law on data retention, information
on every electronic information exchange might be retained for a period
of six months or longer: http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/?lang=en

signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature