From: Frank Gevaerts <frank_at_gevaerts.be>
Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2010 23:32:17 +0200

On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 11:15:46PM +0200, Marcin Bukat wrote:
> There is another question to ask also. Current release scenario
> with freeze->branch->release comes from the fact that "svn
> is not so good with merges" (I heard this many times on IRC).

svn is not very good with merges indeed, but that's not my memory of why
we have a freeze before the branch. I might be wrong (IIRC this was
decided at devcon2008, recordings are available for people who want to
check), but I believe the reasoning was that this would force everyone
to participate in fixing bugs during the freeze (since they wouldn't be
allowed to commit new features anyway). I'm not sure this works as
intended, or if people just keep changes locally for a while. Maybe we
should discuss this at some point. (Why didn't I add release issues to
the DevCon agenda?)

I don't actually think that the "svn is bad at merging" would be a very
good reason for freeze-before-branch, since one could easily ask for no
major changes between branch and release, in which case svn merge works
just fine (since the delta between both branches will be reasonably
small)

Frank

-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan

Received on 2010-06-12