[Mesa-dev] stupid development model causing more problems than its worth

[Dave Airlie]

On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Jose Fonseca <jfonseca at vmware.com> wrote:
> We discussed the pros & cons of this several times, there was never consensus, and there is always room for improvements, but I refuse to discuss them in such terms, where you paint this absurd image of vmware bullying everybody around.

So far the only people who have come out *for* this system are from
the vmware group, apologies if calling the group by the company name
irks people, I suppose I could just name everyone individually, and I
was more meaning people who work on the vmware drivers irrespective,
since they seem to have the ongoing development in stable branch
methodology that no other project people work on uses. For one none of
the older driver contributors seem to be following this model, and
these driver have been around a lot longer. I'm mainly calling you
guys out as you have a very different deployment model that what all
the other mesa drivers have, since you don't actually ship anything in
distros or seem to place any priority on it, but anyone who does want
a useful stable branch has to conform to this wierd and frankly
unusual development model.

What set this off this morning, if contributors to radeon for example
like Maciej have been diligently fixing bugs on master, now with the
development model I cannot cherrypick all these fixes back into 7.8
without causing some upset to someone. Like ideally Maciej would care
about stable branches and the like, but I don't think placing a
requirement on community and free time contributors to take on the
overheads that regression testing stable entails vs just regression
testing their fixes in master as they add features. The thing is fixes
in stable might actually cause regressions in stable, that you won't
find with this model, until its too later. Ideally fixes should go
into master, stew for a week or two, get some more community testing
and then go into stable. I understand the stable fixes model might
work if you have a QA team and comprehensive test coverage but for
most of the community maintained and even company maintained drivers
that isn't a resource we all have to hand.

So sorry I've called out vmware, go back and ^vmware^brian + keith.

Dave.