[Development] ODP: Branches and time based releases

[Nowacki Jedrzej]

________________________________________
Od: development-bounces+jedrzej.nowacki=digia.com at qt-project.org [development-bounces+jedrzej.nowacki=digia.com at qt-project.org] w imieniu Heikkinen Jani [Jani.Heikkinen at digia.com]
Wysłano: 25 lutego 2014 09:59
Do: Thiago Macieira; development at qt-project.org
Temat: Re: [Development] Branches and time based releases

> > > * To create the actual patch level releases (5.x.y), I would propose that
> > > we create a short-lived branch from 5.x. That branch gets tested, but no
> > > patches get directly committed to it (as opposed to the release branch we
> > > have today). Instead I would propose that the release team creates a list
> > > of P0 bugs that still have to be fixed before we can fix 5.x.y. Fixes for
> > > these bugs get pushed to 5.x and cherry-picked to 5.x.y by the release
> > > team. Like that we can control in a better way what goes into the final
> > > release and no developer has to deal with a release branch. It should also
> > > reduce the risk that other changes go in that again break qt5.git CI or
> > > have other negative side effects.
> > 
> > That's what we've been doing with the "release" branch. But now it has a
> > floating name again, like "stable".

> Actually this isn't same than we are doing now in release branch. At the 
> moment developers are directly pushing their changes in release branch 
> and somehow expecting those to be in even it has been told only P0, P1
> (and really important p2) are allowed to be fixed in release branch. In my 
> opinion this would be really good improvement to our process: We take in 
> only those fixes which has agreed to take in and nothing else. OK, there 
> is a kind of similar system available at the moment (only release team 
> stage changes in release branch) but that isn't really working :( We are 
> taking too much changes in release branch at the moment...

You, as the release team, are the gate keeper. You should not stage things that are not suppose to be in. That is why nobody else has the right to stage things in release. Feel free to add -2 to changes that you believe are not good for the release branch. Cherry-picking will change only one thing, instead of having patches in one place (gerrit) you would be asked, by random people to cherry-pick a patch. I'm afraid it will just reduce visibility. Anyway in the end it is your choice :-)

Cheers,
  Jędrek