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

[Bridgman, John]

> Brian Paul
...
> BTW, your last sentence can go either way.  From my point of view
> it's: "Its a lot easier to just fix bugs on the 7.8 branch on 
> those machines, and when you get around to it later merging 
> the changes back into master, and dedicating a day to 
> retesting master on as many configurations as you think 
> require it for you to be happy with the work done."

Would a regular schedule for merging back to master help, say every Friday or something ? I guess the downside of this is that the fixes that go into a release branch probably wouldn't go in if they weren't important, which argues for merging back to master almost immediately. FWIW this was one of the problems we ran into with a branch-first model - rather than fix/fix/fix/fix/merge we ended up with fix/merge fix/merge fix/merge which was no less effort than a master-first flow.

> Also, just because a bug fix works on master is 
> not a guarantee that it won't cause regressions on the stable 
> branch.  It goes both ways.

Amen to that. 
> 
> I think the best way to get stable releases is to get people 
> to work/test more on the stable branches in the first place.