Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Ralph Lange <[email protected]> · Thu, 24 Jun 2010 17:59:41 -0400

On Thu 24 Jun 2010 17:36:56 Andrew Johnson wrote:

On Thursday 24 June 2010 15:16:25 Jeff Hill wrote:

Maybe the solution is to have three independent release series: maybe we
should have the stable production release, the near term features release,
and the evolution release. With that approach we can have an independent
release series on all three versions simultaneously. With this approach it
needs to be very clear to everyone involved where we are headed. That is,
it needs to be very clear that day-to-day support of the production release
will after some longer period of time go away, the near term release will
be eventually declared to be the production release, and the evolution
release will eventually become the near-term feature release. What do you
think?

The way I see it, 3.14.11+patches is our stable production release, the 3.14

series is our near-term features release, and the other branches in Bazaar

demonstrate the directions we might go in. Using a DVCS and publishing lots

of branches allows us to to avoid having to choose a single direction for

evolution before the development on each is finished; I see that as much more

Darwinian (and less risky) than the old CVS approach of having a single branch

for future evolution.

After a discussion with Michael (also see his mail) it is becoming clear

that we might have to reconsider our release policies and schedules. As

you pointed out, the DVCS feature branches allow easier cherrypicking

for the main direction; they would also make backporting single features

to older releases easier.

We should allow a faster integration of "heavy" new features (so that

switching to cmake does not take 8 years), so maybe we need to be

stepping up the minor number more frequent. (Maybe that is getting

easier as we pass pi, but automated tests are crucial for any release

model to work.)

In the end, the conflict is alway the same: We need to provide stable

versions, and must not break production installations. But we also need

people to be able to use new features, else those will never get mature

enough to go into the stable version.

As Ralph pointed out, your work is not yet suitable for merging, and you

haven't posted a merge proposal for it (he is wrong about the code visibility

though, your changes are on the cvs-trunk branch).

Andrew is right, I'm sorry.

I did not consider the cvs-trunk branch an active development area, so I

completely ignored it.

Ralph

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System