Re: fast-forward only policy

[Luis Villa <luis tieguy org>]

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 11:44 PM, Elijah Newren <newren gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Felipe Contreras
> <felipe contreras gmail com> wrote:
>> On the other hand 'gnome-2-0' is not pointing to any release, there
>> where commits after the last release. So my question here is: who
>> would care about those commits? They were done 6 years ago and nobody
>> made a tag that contains them. The arguments I've heard apply to the
>> stable releases (GEDIT_2_0_5), if somebody wants to create a GNOME 2.0
>> build, or make GEDIT_2_0_6 release, they'll probably go for the latest
>> code that was actually released and used.
>
> I disagree; I think they'd check out the branch and use it;
> particularly since that has been the practice for a number of years
> now.  But that's only one side of the issue, and the less interesting
> one at that...
>
> The reason these branches were created and kept was not merely because
> subversion and cvs suck and can't reasonably delete old branches.  Due
> to the various enterprise distributions, developers needed to continue
> to apply patches and make other fixes to versions of the code that
> were several years old and they were duplicating each others' work.
> They had trouble discovering when others were doing similar backports
> and where their work was.  So there was an effort to standardize old
> branch names to make it easy to know where to put their fixes, and
> where other developers could go to find them; these fixes were often
> not straightforward backports given the divergence of the development
> branch and these old versions.  (I believe it was started by an email
> from Federico on desktop-devel-list, but it's been so many years that
> my memory may be faulty there.) Yes, people decided that it was okay
> for developers to commit their fixes without maintainer approval to
> otherwise "unsupported" branches for this particular use.

+1.

Luis