[Development] Proposal: New branch model

[Jedrzej Nowacki]

On Thursday, January 24, 2019 10:29:13 PM CET Ville Voutilainen wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Jan 2019 at 20:26, Simon Hausmann <Simon.Hausmann at qt.io> wrote:
> > I would see the biggest long term impact with the massive amount of cherry
> > picks from dev to qt6 over a long period of time.
> > 
> > Git rerere works locally, so it doesn’t help in this setup I think.
> 
> Completely seriously, without any preference to either branching
> approach: aren't we going to be in some sort of trouble
> with the qt6 branch anyway, no matter what we do? 

I agree. There is also feature based approach, which would make code uglier... 
All in all we will pay some price for keeping Qt6 and Qt5 in parallel.

> But I don't see how going from merge-forward (except also
> merge-backward sometimes) to cherry-pick-backward
> (except also cherry-pick forward, or kinda sideways to qt6, and maybe
> sometimes merge in some direction) is going
> to help us with qt6. These matters seem orthogonal.
> 
> Qt6 and dev are going to diverge. Drastically, eventually. I don't
> know how to solve that. A new branching policy
> is not going to help with that.

It will simplify Qt6 mainly by :
 - distribution of conflict resolution
 - Qt6 development will not be delayed by waiting for merges to happen, 
because some refactoring needs to be done in more stable branches (for example 
tests)

I agree, the branching model is not a silver bullet, it will be ugly anyway, 
let's not make it very slow in the same time :-)

Cheers,
  Jędrek