Merge or Cherry-Pick?

[Andreas Hartmetz]

On Wednesday 02 February 2011 21:15:31 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Wednesday, February 2, 2011, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> > I still think the current procedure is wrong. You're not testing the
> > stable release, there's no guarantee that you're solving the problem at
> > all, or worse, that you're not making it worse.
> 
> and, imho, the stable branch is the more important thing to test: if it
> goes wrong in master due to a bad or unecessary merge from stable, you
> usually have months to notice and fix it. certain you or your teammates
> that also track master will notice it faster than if it sits in the stable
> branch where primary devel isn't happening anymore. with our monthly x.y.z
> releases, you have at most a few weeks with fewer people tracking the
> stable branch to catch a bad merge from master.
> 
> so, again at least imho, the risk is higher when backporting compared to
> forward porting.
> 
> and finally we have a tool that makes it reasonably painless to do it. :)

I have two reasons to test in master:
- I run master myself all the time.
- If a fix really is dangerous I don't want it to appear in a bugfix release "by 
accident".

If nobody was running master who'd make sure its quality was even remotely 
decent? Somehow I don't buy that we should all be testing the latest stable 
branch while developing against master. Switching environments all the time is 
a major hassle and not as effective at finding and making people care about 
bugs in master.