[Development] Setting up time-based releases for the project

BRM bm_witness at yahoo.com
Tue Aug 7 17:50:21 CEST 2012


> From: Oswald Buddenhagen <oswald.buddenhagen at nokia.com>
> Subject: Re: [Development] Setting up time-based releases for the project
> On Tue, Aug 07, 2012 at 11:00:26AM +0200, ext Thiago Macieira wrote:
>>  My recommendation is that master be one of the two stable branches. 
> That's 
>>  what people cloning from Git should get.
>> 
> well, HEAD doesn't have to point to master. but anyway, your point is
> that HEAD should point to the semi-stable branch.
> 
> whether that's a good idea depends on whom HEAD tries to address. a
> somewhat logical assumption would be that it's those who didn't bother
> with (properly) reading the guidelines and policies (which is the
> majority of (new) contributors). it would be reasonable that those are
> most likely to contribute fixes, so the beta branch would be a good
> default.
> otoh, this leaves a certain risk that somebody clueless does major
> development against the beta branch, which then imposes a major
> re-targetting cost. of course, we can just shrug that off as their own
> problem ...

As one of those who is working towards being a new contributor, I would want a use a generally stable branch for most of the initial work of adding a new module; and then move it up towards "fire-hose" just prior to pushing it out to everyone.

That is:

- Grab the 6 month release and do the work; syncing as necessary.
- Once most things are working, then work towards integrating to one of the faster releases, and eventually to the regular dev tree.
- Once in the regular dev tree, then work with everyone to actually push it out into an official release and back down the tree.

To me this makes sense as it allows me more stability while doing the work for an add-on module.

I would suggest we consider this view as well to at least have it documented on what we recommend - whether it is the above or something else entirely. At least it would be somewhere where people looking to add new features will be able to look.

$0.02, fwiw

Ben




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