Merge stable to master vs cherry-picking

[Sandro Knauß]

Hi,

> > Fixing it in master means i have to build a zillion of repositories before
> > even trying to start fixing the bug, it may also happen that once I built
> > master i can't reproduce the bug because master has been fixed for various
> > reasons (re-architecture, fixed the bug and forgot to cherry-pick, etc)

> > Fixing it in the stable branch is much easier, just build the kmail repo
> > and fix the bug.

I fully agree: merge stable is much clearer and easier.

> Maybe I'm missing something but in case which You described, You will still
> need to build all that from master branch to propose patch from stable to
> master. Otherwise how You will know if patch needs to be in master or maybe
> it's already fixed in other way there?

Well for kdepim master means: I need the newest KDE Frameworks available, my 
distro is not that fast shipping them every month. Than I need to build the 
complete pimstack, as you cannot mix different version. This is a lot of work 
just to fix one bug I know that isn't addressed ;) And the bugs are nasty when 
you only see them once in while, so you need to run your fix for several days 
to make sure something is fixed. That's why it is that hard to run it from 
master branch. 
I think that the entrace barrier is higher, when we only have cherry-picking 
and that means that even less people are able to fix kdepim.
I think especially for newcommers and drive-by committers it is much easier to 
be able to just rebuilt one repo instead of a complete stack.

My gut feeling is that git is smarter when you merge than cherry-pick. If 
there are renames or code refactoring happing in master than merge strategy is 
more reliable. At least I get often very small issues when merging stable.

One big argument against cherry-picking is that you are never know if 
everything is inside master because the branches have differnt commits. When 
merging stable to master, than you can be sure that everything changed on 
stable is in master.

Cheers,

sandro