[Releasing] rethinking the branching scheme

[Oswald Buddenhagen]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 01:23:27PM +0100, Sergio Ahumada wrote:
> On 19.02.2014 12:47, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> >    another lesson from today's experience is that despite fairly heavy
> >    restrictions as to who can stage, we *still* got three "rogue" commits
> >    in qtbase/stable today from people who happened to have the rights,
> >    but were not involved in the release process this time. locking this
> >    down even further, tailored to the particular situation each time
> >    around, would be hassle (and thus error-prone).
> 
> just to be precise .. only *one* change got staged/merged after 'stable' 
> was blocked, just in case you are still wondering why the second change 
> got merged even though the person who staged it did *not* have the 
> rights to do it.
> 
ah, right. i didn't pay attention to already staged/integrating changes.
another thing one shouldn't have to worry about in the first place.

> regardless of the topic under discussion .. I think the problem for
> this disaster^Wrelease was mostly the lack of communication.
>
the need for an enormous amount of communication is one of the problems
of the current system. it worked as long as you did everything yourself
and were willing to apply all necessary workarounds (though i'm sure you
didn't really enjoy the number of steps involved, and you made some
mistakes that would have had no chance if the process was less
convoluted).

> I am still waiting for the email that announces that 'stable' and
> 'dev' are blocked and for how long just to give one example.
> 
while we historically sent out these mails, they aren't strictly
necessary ... things were announced in advance, and the reasonable
expectation is "as planned, until further notice". that it's not
sufficient to just fire off a single mail "things went as planned,
please use for/5.3 for important fixes now" to have everything covered,
is part of the problem.