Next Release Planning

[Dave Neary]

Hi,

On 08/22/2012 11:02 AM, Livnat Peer wrote:
> About branching policy I'm not sure if we have one, except for creating
> a branch before release for stabilization.

Allow me to rephrase & make this concrete:

In the GNOME project, modules branch as close as possible to release - 
usually on the release day, or when making a release candidate. In 
effect, the developers agree to work on new features only on branches, 
and the trunk is where most of the pre-release work gets done. Branches 
get merged back into the trunk when they're ready, and not before - and 
never when we're in feature freeze.

We branch a stable branch for fixes to bugs in the stable release, and 
those are as a matter of course fixed in trunk first, and back-ported to 
the stable branch. We have time-based stable releases of the stable 
branch during the first 6 weeks of a release cycle to get those fixes 
out to distros & users.

My understanding of what you've said so far is that at some point (long 
before the August 8th release date), a 3.1 release branch was made, and 
only bug fixes to features which had been included in 3.1 were added to 
that branch from that date. In the meantime, feature and bug fixing work 
continued also on the stable branch, but not all of those bug fixes were 
back-ported to the pre-release branch. I'm guessing that branch was made 
when we hit 3.1 feature freeze?

If my understanding is correct, you then have a period of several months 
(because of the release date slip) when the 3.1 branch is not moving 
very much, and everyone is working on the trunk branch, including 
developing new features. The end result is that when the release is 
made, there is already a big diff with trunk, and as you point out, 
cherry-picking bug fixes for inclusion on a 3.1 branch is a lot of work.

In my mind, the work on 3.2 started when we made the 3.1 branch, in this 
scenario, so perhaps we're already too late to discuss what needs to be 
included in the 3.2 release - perhaps we should simply work on 
finishing/stabilising what we have now for release?

Again, excuse me if I'm over-stepping bounds, I'm just trying to figure 
out where the work in the project is getting done, and what that implies 
for this thread.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
Community Action and Impact
Open Source and Standards Team, Red Hat
Phone: +33 9 50 71 55 62