[Digikam-devel] separate branch for releases

[Marcel Wiesweg]

> When was the last release, everybody was told that 2 weeks before the
> release, no features must be commited in branch master, only bugfixes.
> 
> i thinks is not right to stop the development process and i have a small
> suggestion:
> 
> A month before release of certain version of digikam, to create a separate
> branch, where only bugfixes and be applied.I don't know, maybe to apply
> bugfixes on both master and new release branch and delete the branch or
> simply to add bugfixes and merge the branch after release.
> 
> Also, branch can give us  more time for testing, so we could prevent
> situations like these:
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=281767
> 
> and development process won't stop especially when you need to apply fixes
> that depends on code that wasn't commited yet

Suggestions like these are fully justified in larger projects. If you look at 
the commit log of digikam, you'll see Gilles, me, and Francesco doing the 
majority of commits. Who is going to backport bug fixes? Who is going to 
maintain the branch? Who is going to test it?
There is another point: A commit freeze forces developers to do bug fixing. 
Feature development is fun, bug fixing is tedious. So we need to force 
ourselves to do it.
Third, with git, it is possible to have either local commits or even local or 
remote feature branches if a larger patch is to be developed.7

Marcel