[Development] Proposal: New branch model

[Jedrzej Nowacki]

Dnia środa, 23 stycznia 2019 22:04:16 CET Allan Sandfeld Jensen pisze:
> On Mittwoch, 23. Januar 2019 16:51:10 CET Jedrzej Nowacki wrote:
> >   Proposal in short: let's use cherry-pick mode everywhere.
> >   
> >   All(**) changes would go to dev. From which they would be automatically
> > 
> > cherry-picked by a bot to other branches. The decision to which branch
> > cherry-
> 
>  pick, would be taken based on a tag in the commit message. We
> 
> > could add a footer that marks the change risk level as in quip-5
> > (http://quips-qt-io.herokuapp.com/quip-0005.html), so for example "dev",
> > "stable", "LTS". By default everything would be cherry-picked to qt6
> > branch
> > unless "no-future" tag would be given. Of course we can bike-shed about
> > the
> > tag names.
> 
> I don't see any advantage to this what so ever. The same amount of work and
> refactoring needs to be done, all you have done is made development more
> prone to human error, and fixes less likely to reach their intended target,
> and made getting point releases out on time harder as they need to go
> through more steps before they have all their patches in.
> 
> 'Allan


It is hard to answer this because you have forgotten to write why you think 
that development would be more error prone or fixes less likely to reach the 
destination or more steps would be involved in releasing. So I will try 
shooting in the dark :-)

The current merging strategy involves couple of people, one merge master and a 
random reviewer that looks at conflicts if there are any. Usually it is not 
even close to quality level we have for single patches in which we have more 
reviewers and gerrit shows the real diff. In practice we assume that no 
conflicts == good merge.

Fixes are less likely to hit target branches, true, but only if nobody cares. 
Mark that a fix can magically disappear during broken mere, nobody will see it. 
The proposed solution allows at least track such cases.

Releases branches already use cherry-pick mode so from that perspective there 
is no big changes, the only one is the origin branch from which the cherry-
pick should happen.

Cheers,
  Jędrek