Freezes and Git Migration

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 26.04.10 00:01:09, Niko Sams wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 22:07, Andreas Pakulat <apaku at gmx.de> wrote:
> > and then merge the current stable
> > branch into master on a regular basis (I'm thinking about once a month).
> Usually bugfixes are important for unstable branches too.

Of course, hence the merging.

> Who will do the merging? and when?

Well, good questions. I think if we decide on a when, then the who will
just be a matter of whoever remembers doing it on the date... As I said
once-a-month should be pretty ok, so 1st of month or last day of the
month as a fixed date. And this basically works like this:

git checkout 4.1
git merge 4.0
git checkout 4.2
git merge 4.1
git checkout 4.3
git merge 4.2
...
...
git checkout master
git merge 4.x

That way we're sure all bugfixes are in master by the end of the current
month or the start of the current month.

This however means not releasing anything besides TP's or alpha's from
master. Even Beta-Releases would then be done from a stable branch and
the branching would happen when the hard-feature-freeze starts. That
would mean that master is always open for feature-merging (or shut down
at most a single day) and doing bugfixes is as easy as possible (check
out the oldest branch that has the bug, fix it there, wait until it
propagates upwards).

As cmake makes it very easy to switch between branches (multiple
builddirs) this shouldn't be a burden for anybody. But we need to make
sure that our bugtracking is good and that bugs get a proper "version"
set so we know in which version this started to happen. If that doesn't
happen we'd need to try out various older branches until we find the
oldest one... 

We might also declare certain branches as unmaintained at some point,
i.e. we won't fix bugs in them anymore (I'm thinking about
current-stable-branch - 2 for that). So you don't have to try to compile
a 3 year old kdevelop 4.0 on a recent KDE...

> > There are other development models (amarok uses one,
> Is that documented somewhere?

I think in their list-archive, I'll try to dig that out tomorrow (if I
forget it ping me on irc).

Andreas

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