Re: fast-forward only policy

[Felipe Contreras <felipe contreras gmail com>]

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 1:21 AM, Marc-André Lureau
<marcandre lureau gmail com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 12:57 AM, Felipe Contreras
> <felipe contreras gmail com> wrote:
>> [...] what is the point of having 'project' in the branch
>> name? Branches are per-repository, so you would never have a non
>> 'gtk-' branch in the GTK+ repo.
>>
>
> Not "project" but really "[project]-[MAJOR]-[MINOR]"..

Yes, I meant why "project-major-minor" (gtk-2-17) when you already
know 'project'. What information would be lost with a '2-17' branch
name?

>> In fact, AFAIK at any given time GNOME projects have at most two lines
>> of development. When GTK+ 2.17 is released, work on 2.16 is continued,
>> but not on 2.15, so what is the point of keeping the 'gtk-2-15'
>> branch? (or gtk-2-14) In reality you only have a 'master' and a
>> sometimes a 'devel' branch.
>>
>
> You should read http://live.gnome.org/MaintainersCorner#branches

Just read it. I'm not sure exactly what you wanted to highlight.

> Stable branches are useful! Most projects have mostly stable branches, afaik.

Hmm, I'm not sure we are talking about the same thing. My
understanding is that in most projects there's only one 'stable'
branch, as in "the most stable branch we have at the moment". Some
projects have 'devel' ("we are currently working on it, but it's not
that sable") and some have 'next' ("this is what you'll get on the
next big release, it's probably stable enough").

After reading that link (and some email searching), I think you do a
"branching" process where you create a branch for the stable release
and keep the development on the "master" branch. In that case I would
suggest instead of creating a "gtk-2-16" branch just use a "stable"
branch, which will jump (or merge) from what you now call "gtk-2-14"
to "gtk-2-16" when you do this branching process. The "gtk-2-14"
commits won't be lost as long as they are tagged.

>> I would suggest a few official branch names like 'master' and 'devel',
>> and a special two character prefix for personal branches like
>> 'za-transcoding-rework' (Zeeshan Ali's personal branch), the rest
>> would be up to the project to decide.
>
> A bit like what Zeeshan proposes then.

Yeap, exactly, I'm just proposing a specific nomenclature.

-- 
Felipe Contreras