[Openchrome-users] P4M900, ASUS P5VD2-VM SE Motherboard, Ubuntu Gutsy openchrome display problem

[J. Dale Gonzalez]

On Jan 18, 2008 4:35 PM, Marco Pieruccetti <pieru at libero.it> wrote:
> Benno Schulenberg wrote:
> > No, not with experimental branch, nor with experimental trunk.  Get
> > your names right: trunk.  Just plain trunk.
> >
> > Benno
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> >
>
> Ops, sorry, but..... now i'm confused. I have not understood
> differences....
> So how many releases (stable, unstable, experimental, parallel-or-not
> branches) are there ?!? ;-)
>
> Thanks
>
> Marco
>
>
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>
>

At the risk of stepping in and answering a question on which I'm not
an expert... stable/unstable are typically ways to talk about a
release.  trunk and experimental are branches in source code control.

So, here's how this works...

Developers are busily checking code in to a number of places.  For
subversion, the primary place to check in code is called "trunk".
Releases (which I'll describe in a bit) typically come out of the
trunk.  When you do an svn co http://big_path_to_the_code/trunk, you
are effectively getting an unstable release.  It's unstable because it
contains a random collection of changes that have been checked in by
developers and may or may not be fully tested/integrated/etc...  Now,
during development, often a group of developers will begin work on a
feature that is expected to take longer than a release cycle, is
considered experimental and might be tossed aside or needs an
unchanging code base as its beginning.  When that happens, they create
a branch in the source code control system.  The openchrome guys have
created one called "experimental".  This is where they're doing the
most cutting edge and least tested stuff.  Having this branch lets
them fix bugs in the released code by changing the code in trunk,
without worrying about what impact their new cutting edge code will
have on the users.

At some point, the code in trunk is considered tested enough and a
release is created.  That release becomes the stable code version and
typically comes from trunk.  At our place, we tag the trunk -
basically creating a snapshot of the way the code looked on a
particular date and make that our "stable" release.

At some other point, the experimental code will be considered to be
good enough for the main branch.  At that point it's merged into trunk
and perhaps a new release is made.

So.... at any point, any project has:

1) The stable "released" code. This is a snapshot of the code in trunk
on a particular day when it was considered "good enough" to
distribute.  Most folks are going to want to take use the release.

2) The code in trunk.  This will usually be the code used to make the
release plus any bug fixes that were discovered since the release.
Some development groups also put features here.  Mine does not.  Folks
that need a fix for a particular bug and can't wait until the next
release will have to take the trunk code.

3) The code in one or more branches.  Openchrome has one called
experimental.  Almost nobody should take this code except the
developers UNLESS you are interested in helping with testing,
developing or really, really, really can't wait for a new feature that
is being worked on in one of the branches.

At least, that's how we do it where I work.  The Openchrome team may
do things slightly differently.

And, just to clarify...

The experimental branch doesn't work on the P4M900 and that isn't very
surprising.

The trunk branch does work on the P4M900.

The "released" code I can't comment on because I didn't try it.