I guess what I'm looking for is guidance for what was left out of tip 61.
I've been told by more senior developers to commit packages to either HEAD or the oacs-5-1 branch. Different people tend to say different things.
The installation docs have people checkout packages using the compat tags. That makes development on either HEAD or the oacs-5-1 branch possible. So I guess either approach is acceptible, and that was why it was left out of TIP 61?
Other developers have expressed confusion. They would like some direction as to how to checkout packages and help contribute to them. Having two different systems makes it more complicated for them to get involved. People are asking me which branch they should check out, and I'm not really sure what to tell them. We don't really have a standard way of doing it.
Currently, I do my development on an OpenACS 5.1 installation (my developmental server). Once it is tested, I make a patch of my work, and patch the package in a checkout from HEAD, commit, and tag with openacs-5-1 compat. This allows me to make local edits in separate commits, but it does add some complexity. And it's not the most robust way of doing things.
I've asked in the past about the best way to set up CVS for development and production, to have local modifications, and still interact with OpenACS. The consensus seemed to be that CVS is not very good for this, and that everybody does it their own way, and no way is perfect, and darn wouldn't it be nice if we were all using Arch. I'd personally prefer to hear of one way that less experienced developers can default to while we learn the ropes, even if it's not perfect.
I'd like to write the documentation for this, so it's up there for everyone. But I'm still not totally clear on what the preferred way to do things is.