Re: Merging the msvc branch into maint

[Stefano Lattarini]

On 12/22/2011 08:26 AM, Peter Rosin wrote:
> Hi!
> 
Hi Peter.

> Since the msvc branch has been merged into both branch-1.11 and master,
> it seems natural to also merge it into maint. No?
>
I'd rather not.  First, it wouldn't be useful, since we do 1.11.x maintenance
releases from branch-1.11 only, we plan to do the next 1.12 release from
master, and both of these branches already contain the features from msvc.

Second, and more important, the versions of msvc merged into branch-1.11 and
master are sligthly different, in that the one on branch-1.11 doesn't have
the new `extra-portability' warnings enabled by -Wall (this is required for
backward compatibility, which a maintenance version should pay particular
attention to, but is not a behaviour we would want to carry in future
versions, for reasons you had so eloquently explained in a past discussion).

So, if we merge msvc into maint as-is, that would create merge conflicts when
we merge maint back into branch-1.11, and worse, would cause the code from
maint to have a behaviour more similar to that of the next major version than
to that of the next maintenance version.  OTOH, we could backport the hacks
for 1.11.2 into maint, and confuse the already-too-messy automake history
even more.  Neither of these two possibility should particularly appealing to
me, given that in the end they do not offer any real advantage anyway.

> Currently maint holds an outdated version of e.g. lib/compile.
> 
> Cheers,
> Peter
> 

Regards,
  Stefano