New release cycle; was: Re: [dev] Fwd: HEAD

[Jon Parise]

On Sat, Mar 22, 2003 at 06:17:53PM -0600, Eric Rostetter wrote:

> Any way we could automate something that would check for "merge after"
> dates/contents in cvs and create a notice, or something like that?  Not
> sure if it is possible, but it would help perhaps (assuming we used 

That was the original plan, and I actually started implementing that
functionality based on FreeBSD's scripts:

    http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/projects/mfcns/

I've used the "Merge after:" field fairly often.  I just keep a
separate mailbox of my CVS commit messages and check it often to see
whether I'm due to merge any changes back into a release branch.  It's
not really hard to work that step into your normal development
process.
 
> > Beside that this is hard and sometimes
> > annoying work, it potentially introduces bugs to the stable branch because
> > we add a lot of new code in very few time. We've seen that it lead to x.x.1
> > releases in the recent versions.
> 
> Agreed.  But all this means is we are not merging stuff as we go along
> as we should be.  If we did it as we went along, rather than trying to
> do it all at once at the last minute, we'd have fewer problems, and find
> them earlier.
 
I think the biggest overall problem (or, at least, the cause of our
release problems) is that very few Horde developers seem to actually
run the stable releases.  If more did, then there would be a greater
impetus to merge changes back into the stable branches.

(I can't back that up, but it seems like a reasonable assumption.)

-- 
Jon Parise (jon at horde.org) :: The Horde Project (http://horde.org/)