[Mesa-dev] so the development model is working?

[Brian Paul]

Bridgman, John wrote:
>> From: ... Brian Paul
>> Sent: Friday, April 30, 2010 12:17 AM
>> To: Dave Airlie
>> Cc: mesa-dev at lists.freedesktop.org
> ...
>> If you're concerned about producing a stable driver, why 
>> aren't you making more fixes to the 7.8/stable branch, 
>> whether by cherry picking or whatever?  That's the whole 
>> point of it.  Master is not a stable branch.
>>
>> Look above and see if you can guess why I prefer doing merges 
>> to cherry-pick.?  I'd rather do 3 merges vs. 20+ 
>> cherry-picks.  Cherry picking quickly becomes a PITA once you 
>> get beyond a handful of patches or one commit per week or so.
> 
> Quick question;
> 
> Dave's comments implied that there is a policy against fixing bugs
> in master then cherry picking 'em to stable; your comments implied
> master-first plus cherry pick is OK but you feel that fixing in
> stable and merging back to master is a *better* way of working.

I'd rather avoid cherry picks like that, but that's better than bugs 
not getting into the stable branch at all.  A neat git history (w/out 
duplicate commits) isn't as important as getting fixes into the stable 
branch either, IMO.

If fixes originate in the stable branch, they won't get lost or left 
behind from master thanks to periodic merges.  As it now, when things 
are fixed on master they're not getting into the stable branch.  Even 
if we had a cherry-pick policy, I'm sure some fixes would fall through 
the cracks.


> Is it fair to say that if a developer is working in master and
> notices a potential bug fix then it's OK to fix in master and
> cherry-pick that fix to one or more stable branches afterwards, but
> if the "primary task" is fixing a bug (particularly a big
> discovered in stable) then fixing first in the stable branch is
> preferred ?

Well, if I said "OK", that'd be an excuse for people to just work on 
master all the time (and again, I bet some of those fixes would get lost).


> re: the overall development model, my main question would be
> whether continuing work on a release branch after the initial
> release is really still required now that we have quarterly major
> releases for all the major components.

I think that maintaing stable branches is important and master is not 
always a stable place.

-Brian