[Development] [HEADS-UP] Updates to branching scheme

André Pönitz apoenitz at t-online.de
Fri Nov 25 20:41:42 CET 2016


On Fri, Nov 25, 2016 at 05:09:30PM +0100, Giuseppe D'Angelo wrote:
> Il 25/11/2016 13:40, Oswald Buddenhagen ha scritto:
> > - 5.6 is *NOT* going to be forward-merged any more, *ever* (also not to
> >   merge tags)
> > - you may integrate only changes which have been already integrated into
> >   a stable mainline
> 
> Sorry, but need to raise an objection against this strategy, or at least
> ask for many more clarifications about this process.
> 
> To me this looks like asking all contributors to at least double the
> effort necessary to fix bugs that are (also) present in 5.6: patch 5.x,
> get it merged, cherry-pick to 5.6, get it merged there.
> 
> On average, the cherry-pick to 5.6 will mean rewrite the patch, because:
> 
> 1) The whole motivation for stop doing merges from 5.6 forward is the
> high number of conflicts between the branches.

That's not true, it's also about the time it takes for a patch to
trickle down from 5.6 to dev to enable dependent work there.

> Therefore, I can assume
> that conflicts will be also be hit when cherry-picking back.

E.f.s.q.
 
> So, while on one hand this new branching scheme distributes the burden
> from the current merge masters onto the bigger community, in practice
> I'm very afraid (read: almost certain) that this will mean that very few
> people will be willing to do the extra work, hence leaving 5.6 unpatched
> for ordinary, non-critical bug fixes.

Being more and more restrictive as the patch levels increase does
not really sound like a problem for LTS release.

> This makes using a LTS quite less attractive to me.

Using with what hat on? People with a "end user programmer hat" want
something stable there, no new features. People with a "Qt developer
hat" do not want to wait weeks for dependendecies to trickle down.

> Are we sure there isn't a better way?

I am not sure there isn't, I am just not aware of such either.

Andre'



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