Git repositories created and how to work with them

[Nicolai Haehnle]

On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 5:31 PM, Andreas Pakulat <apaku at gmx.de> wrote:
> On 05.05.10 16:12:56, Nicolai Haehnle wrote:
>> Lurker here...
>>
>> On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 9:21 AM, Andreas Pakulat <apaku at gmx.de> wrote:
>> > I've created a 4.0 branch already from master, thats our stable branch
>> > and should get all bugfix commits on it. We'll than have to make sure
>> > that its merged once a week (or more often for important fixes) into
>> > master so that master also gets the bugfixes. I don't want to be
>> > responsible alone for that, so if anybody notices no merge on sunday
>> > evening if there's been commits to 4.0 branch in the week, please just
>> > do the merge.
>>
>> For what it's worth, there has just been a discussion on the Mesa3d
>> mailing list about getting rid of exactly this process. At least from
>> my understanding, the main problems with this process are:
>
> Whats the outcome? Amarok (not sure about konversation) took also a
> different route where they directly release from master, but I think master
> is closed for feature-development and hence basically is a stable branch.
> Only at certain point when a given feature branch is finished and tested
> enough is it merged into master. But I'm not 100% sure what their exact
> model is wrt. commits that may go directly into master...

Last I heard, they're going to try the cherry-pick / backport model,
but it's too soon to say whether it will be more successful.

My personal guesstimate is that it really depends on the people who
care about the stable branches. As a developer, I prefer to stick to
master, but if there were a stable maintainer, I wouldn't mind tagging
potential backport candidate commits as such in the commit message.
However, no such process existed for Mesa, which resulted in a lot of
bugfixes that ended up in master only.