[Development] Focusing bug fixes to 5.9 branch and patch releases during H1/17

[Marc Mutz]

On Tuesday 11 April 2017 10:34:20 Ville Voutilainen wrote:
> To elaborate: I run a bleeding-edge compiler. It feels odd to me that
> the best branch to run it on
> is a non-bleeding-edge branch, it's quite the opposite.

I know GCC works differently, probably because you use a RCS that sucks at 
merging, but the Qt way was, and continues to be, to put (important) bug-fixes 
(incl. compile-fixes) into the stable branch, and merge them up. This is how 
Git works best, and apart from LTS, we strongly discourage cherry-picking. The 
problem at hand is now whether 5.8 continues to be the stable branch, even 
though no release is planned from it.

I say yes, and Tuuka says no.

As a compromise, I suggested to keep qtbase's 5.8 open, and close the other 
module's 5.8 branches.

Repeating Thiago's stats from Mar 14th:

$ git rev-list --no-merges --since=2.months.ago v5.8.0..origin/5.8 | wc -l
228
$ git rev-list --no-merges --since=2.months.ago origin/5.8..origin/5.9 | wc -l
346
$ git rev-list --no-merges --since=2.months.ago origin/5.9..origin/dev | wc -l
202

So, at this point, 5.9 receives more commits, but 5.8 is far from starved. It 
receives roughly half the commits 5.9 receives, also at shorter scales:

$ git rev-list --no-merges --since=March.14th v5.8.0..origin/5.8 | wc -l
71
$ git rev-list --no-merges --since=March.14th origin/5.8..origin/5.9 | wc -l
156
$ git rev-list --no-merges --since=March.14th origin/5.9..origin/dev | wc -l
131

I see lots of advantages to keeping 5.8 open, but as usual, you will counter 
them with "CI is overloaded" and that'll be the end of the discussion. In 
January, TQC promised to increase the CI capacity. It's now three months later 
and you still use the same argument? This re-inforces the fear that we'll also 
not have a 5.9.1.

Thanks,
Marc

-- 
Marc Mutz <marc.mutz at kdab.com> | Senior Software Engineer
KDAB (Deutschland) GmbH & Co.KG, a KDAB Group Company
Tel: +49-30-521325470
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