[Releasing] rethinking the branching scheme

[Thiago Macieira]

Em qua 19 fev 2014, às 15:19:08, Frederik Gladhorn escreveu:
> 3. My impression is that we don't release enough patch releases. The reason
> is  probably not simple. I suspect that we make the whole harder by not
> having branches, so we don't even see if a release is worthwhile and we
> don't encourage patches that would go into 5.1.x since there is basically
> now way to contribute them. This is also problematic for security fixes.
> On a technical level it's trivial to create a branch from any tag/sha1, but
> it  seems to be a more social problem to me.
> Maybe having dev/stable/5.2/5.3/5.4 branches would make this easier.
> Other issues are of course that each release has a big cost in QA and 
> packaging etc.

I think that the manpower issue is the biggest problem here. Sure, the current 
scheme makes us unable to make further 5.1 releases, but no one is looking to 
contributing to that. We are still able to make 5.2 releases, as 5.2 is in the 
"release" branch, but we don't have the manpower to do it.

Before discussing whether the naming problem would solve anything, I'd like to 
see us attempt 5.2.2 around 5.3 alpha end before 5.3 beta. If we find the time 
to do it but the branches make it more difficult, then we can discuss names. 
Otherwise, the point is moot.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center