[Development] Proposal: New branch model

[Ville Voutilainen]

On Thu, 24 Jan 2019 at 15:39, Shawn Rutledge <Shawn.Rutledge at qt.io> wrote:
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> > On 24 Jan 2019, at 14:15, Jedrzej Nowacki <Jedrzej.Nowacki at qt.io> wrote:
> >
> > Typical use case I have with bug fixing in dev is when I develop a feature and
> > I see let's say a memory leak in the code that I'm modifying or somewhere
> > around. With the merge model I have four options now:
> > 1. Pretend that I haven't seen it
> > 2. Make a fix in LTS and develop my feature separately, counting on the merge
> > master to resolve conflicts
> > 3. Do the fix only in dev
> > 4. Make a fix in LTS and wait for all merges before I continue with the feature
> > If it is a memory leak then it is not as bad as memory corruption and crashes,
> > as at that point I can not use approach 2. Option 1 and 3 are not great from
> > QA perspective. Option 4 is slow and kills motivation for development.
>
> 5. Ask Liang to do a merge ASAP, as soon as the LTS fix is integrated
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> 6. Do the merge yourself on dev, push it, add reviewers, and in the meantime, develop your feature on top (but so far we have a cultural limitation on who is allowed to do this)
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> 7. Cherry-pick the fix patch on dev so that you can keep working.  After that:
> 7a. Periodically run git pull —rebase locally until the rebase pulls in the merged fix, and your new changes are now on the tip; by then, nobody can see that you did the cherry-pick; or,
> 7b. Push both patches, with the cherry-picked fix marked WIP and with a note that it’s a temporary cherry-pick, so that nobody will try to review or integrate it (or write redundant comments reminding you that you shouldn’t do that).  This way you can get your new work reviewed: you just can’t stage it until the merge is done (and then you can abandon the cherry-picked fix).

Right. As opposed to

in-backporting-cherry-pick-mode) fix the bug in dev, backport to older
branches, life on all branches goes on with the fix applied

Having seven options is not necessarily better.