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Re: branch-2-0 vs CVS HEAD
From: |
Gary V. Vaughan |
Subject: |
Re: branch-2-0 vs CVS HEAD |
Date: |
Tue, 23 Aug 2005 17:28:04 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (X11/20050305) |
Hi Bob!
Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
On Tue, 23 Aug 2005, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
Now, our branch-2-0 testsuite is much inferior, so it's less likely to
_find_ some of these bugs. Add to that the fact that I for one do not
know of one single bug present in HEAD but not in branch-2-0.
This is why I would branch the next stable off of HEAD. And I wouldn't
do it _yet_, but only when all known regressions from HEAD are fixed and
we can start undoing whatever made CVS Autoconf/Automake necessary. And
when we finally do that, we have a chance to *really* make it a couple
of weeks (2!) from branching to releasing an alpha, and then 2 more to
releasing.
Hear! Hear!
Blast. Seems I'm outvoted. To my mind there are good arguments for
either case... but I'm not rabid about keeping branch-2-0 alive, so if
the concensus is to drop the current branch-2-0 then so be it. Anyone
else want to weigh in before anything is settled upon firmly?
Release branches are supposed to be there to support releases, not
hard-core development. Instead, the 2.0 branch has been used for
hard-core development with an immense amount of patching. I think it
may be 1-1/2 years old now. In my opinion, if after creating a release
branch, a stable release can't be prepared within a couple of weeks,
then there is something *dreadfully wrong*. The software should be
stabilized *before* the branch is created. The 2.0 branch should have
been aborted at that time.
I disagree. There was definitely a need for somewhere to commit new
features that didn't belong in 2.0, and traditionally HEAD is where that
happens. I think the release branch should be made at feature freeze,
and bugs worked on in the release branch without stalling development in
HEAD.
During this whole time, the 2.0 branch has acted like a parasite and has
sucked much of the life out of the project. Because of the extreme
delay with the 2.0 branch, it became necessary to continue maintenance
of the 1.5.X branch (which was supposed to stop at 1.5.2, not continue
on to 1.5.20). And of course there was also significant development on
HEAD. So the end result is that we have *three* libtool projects
requiring *three* times the maintenance, and *three* times the volume of
patch emails. Only very dedicated maintainers are able to keep up with
three similar projects at the same time.
ACK. Maybe the way to go when faced with this decision again for 2.2
should be to create a development branch that is merged back in when
branch-2-2 is forked from HEAD? Man CVS is the pits!
I totally agree that the quality of the test suite defines the quality
of the product, provided that the product passes the test suite. Quite
often, things which are not tested, are broken. A better test suite
leads to a better product. If HEAD has a much better test suite than
2.0 and is passing its tests on many platforms, then it is naturally a
better product.
ACK.
Cheers,
Gary.
--
Gary V. Vaughan ())_. address@hidden,gnu.org}
Research Scientist ( '/ http://tkd.kicks-ass.net
GNU Hacker / )= http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool
Technical Author `(_~)_ http://sources.redhat.com/autobook
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Re: branch-2-0 vs CVS HEAD, Noah Misch, 2005/08/22
Re: branch-2-0 vs CVS HEAD, Albert Chin, 2005/08/22
- Re: branch-2-0 vs CVS HEAD, Ralf Wildenhues, 2005/08/23
- Re: branch-2-0 vs CVS HEAD, Albert Chin, 2005/08/23
- Re: branch-2-0 vs CVS HEAD, Gary V. Vaughan, 2005/08/23
- Re: branch-2-0 vs CVS HEAD, Albert Chin, 2005/08/23
- Re: branch-2-0 vs CVS HEAD, Ralf Wildenhues, 2005/08/23
- Re: branch-2-0 vs CVS HEAD, Bob Friesenhahn, 2005/08/23
- Re: branch-2-0 vs CVS HEAD,
Gary V. Vaughan <=
- Re: branch-2-0 vs CVS HEAD, Peter O'Gorman, 2005/08/24
Re: branch-2-0 vs CVS HEAD, Gary V. Vaughan, 2005/08/23