Forum OpenACS Improvement Proposals (TIPs): Re: TIP #61: (Approved) Guidelines for CVS committers

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Posted by Roberto Mello on
I agree with Jeff. Our current approach is not perfect, but it's the best we've identified so far.

Jeff has been doing a great job with CVS maintenance and merging, and has proven that it works well.

The problem that you are really trying to address is the disparity between the stable and the HEAD branches. The compromise I can see would be to do more frequent merges. But as Jeff has pointed out, this is more work. If you are willing to take on that work, and can convince Jeff that you can do it well, I'm sure other OCT members would follow.

-Roberto

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Posted by Joel Aufrecht on
Eduardo, can you explain this a bit more for me:
> For core packages, bug fixes should be committed on the 
> current release branch whenever applicable.

The problem with this one is that some developers have to 
develop with old code in the stable branch because HEAD 
contains bugs. I see many people on the lists that have 
these problems.
I think most developers should be developing against 5.1, not HEAD. The rules about bug fixes vs new features only apply to core, not to the other packages. (I know all this could be clearer - it's taken me about two years to understand even as much as I do now, which is still only a subset of the problem space and a smaller subset of the solution space - and I'm going to work on some docs this week.) The only time you should be working on HEAD is if you are doing development directly on core packages. This approach should get you all of the benefits - you can still do whatever you want to your packages. If you are working on the standard packages (file-storage, forums, etc), you can still do minor or even major releases, and you know your releases will be available for most other users much sooner than if they depended on HEAD core.
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Posted by Joel Aufrecht on
I've updated TIP #61 with the amendments from TIP #70.  I took the liberty of relabelling the new rules 5 and 6 as 5.1 and 5.2, and moved some of the reasons out to the Reasons section for easier reading.