So what next?

[Jim Gettys]

On Thu, 2004-04-08 at 10:47, Kaleb S. KEITHLEY wrote:
> Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> 
> > (I tried to call in this morning, but got tired of listening to hold
> >  music and had another meeting at the same time to go to instead.)
> > 
> > Where do we put things now?  Is XORG-RELEASE-1 being merged back to
> > XORG-CURRENT?  
> 
> Yes, in my copious spare time. My day job takes priority.
> 
> > When will the branch for 6.7.1 be branched

We have to merge several ways: the current release back to
current or head, depending on what we decide to do.

XORG-CURRENT isn't wonderful being different from head,
as then things like viewcvs don't do sane things for
showing you what the current state of the main development
looks like.  And it also means that people who do
naive checkouts get completely broken bits, also not good.

So I think most of us would like to not follow the
BSD style branch stuff Kaleb originally set up for this reason,
but work more like the style of Gnome and KDE.

We should talk this over tomorrow (Friday) on the call,
along with doing a post mortem on what we did well, and
what we did badly.

I would recommend we again branch for release possibly
as much as a month before our next release, and again
control carefully the commits onto that branch.

We also have to get the modular bits back in sync with
the first release, and get them to completely match
the monolithic functionality.

In any case, let's talk about all this on the next release wrangler's
call.

I suspect we should all take a look at how Mozilla does
their branching (for the monolithic release); the situation
is pretty similar in this case, and they have a pretty well
written description of how they do this.

I don't think we (yet) need all their process, but it is
worth taking a look at what they do; as activity scales up
over the next year or two, we can expect to have to face
at least some of the same issues.

Getting to the modular release, however, will reduce somewhat
some of those pressures, as then a full release is a collection
of released tarballs, and you can usually handle things in
a bit less draconian fashion in many parts of the process.

http://www.mozilla.org/hacking/

                           - Jim

-- 
Jim Gettys <Jim.Gettys at hp.com>
HP Labs, Cambridge Research Laboratory