Re: Orca Ok, stupid newbie question time, was Re: Settings dialog is partially unreadable

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Krister:

These are definitely confusing terms and people tend to toss them around 
like everyone knows what they mean.  The general concepts are these:

1) A source code repository typically keeps track of all the revisions 
made to a file.  As a result, one can go "back in time" and grab an 
earlier copy of a file and one can also see each change made to a file 
over time.

2) The source code repository allows typically developers to create 
milestones or snapshots of the all the sources for a project at any 
point in time.  These 'milestones' or 'tags' and represent what the 
source code looks like at a given point in time.  We typically create 
tags for each milestone during the GNOME release cycle.  For example, 
there were tags for Orca 2.17.1, 2.17.2, and so on.

3) At some point in time, developers will want to make a significant 
change to a project.  These changes can be somewhat risky and 
disruptive.  At such a point, the developers will decide to keep on 
supporting one particular snapshot while also making significant changes 
for the future.  To help this, the developers will 'branch' the source 
code repository.  The idea behind the branch is that it is essentially a 
snapshot, but you can keep developing against that snapshot.  Changes 
made to a branch don't automatically effect the latest bleeding edge 
code and vice versa.

There are many ways to view trunks and branches.  The typical manner is 
that the trunk is the free-for-all risky stuff and the branches are the 
more stable stuff.  I've also seen other projects that have done the 
opposite (i.e., develop crazy ideas in a branch and then later attempt 
to merge back into the trunk).  Right now, however, the model for Orca 
is typically this:

1) The 'trunk' is the latest bleeding edge stuff, and is also referred 
to as 'head'.  Us Orcians try to keep the trunk relatively bug free and 
stable, but there are moments where we do make sweeping changes and the 
trunk might be unstable for a day or two.  We try to keep these kinds of 
things to a minimum (once or twice a year).

2) The forcing factor for branching tends to be the restrictions laid 
down by the GNOME release team (e.g., no string changes allowed, no GUI 
changes allowed, etc.).   We have branches for gnome-2-16 and gnome-2-18. 

As important critical problems come up and as additional translations 
are made, we will update branches and make new releases.  As we do a 
release, we will also tag the snapshot of the branch/trunk that was used 
to make the release.

Hope this helps,

Will


Krister Ekstrom wrote:
> Hi,
> The jargon of Linux can be very confusing at times. what does "trunk",
> "head" and "branch" mean in programming and svn/cvs terms? What versions
> are the newest and which are the safest? If i should check out a version
> from 2.18, do i down- or upgrade my version of Orca?
> /Krister
>
>
> Rich Burridge wrote:
>   
> > Hi Hermann,
> >
> >     
> > > what happened to the Orca preferences dialog?
> > > The tab Speech is partially unreadable. All synthesizer settings can't be 
> > > adjusted. Orca doesn't show them, neither braille nor speech. You can see 
> > > them in flat review, but clicking on them doesn't bring them up, so no 
> > > changes can be made. Something went wrong I guess.
> > > A similar problem exists in the key bindings tab. The first point, the Orca 
> > > key, is not reachable.
> > > I think a fix is needed urgently.
> > > I use the latest Orca, about an hour ago.
> > >   
> > >       
> > If you are checking out of Orca SVN trunk/HEAD, you could have been 
> > caught in the
> > middle of the large refactor I've just done. Hopefully it's complete 
> > now, but things are
> > going to be in a state of flux in HEAD for a few more days as we checkin 
> > all the various
> > changes we've been waiting to do (but couldn't because of the various 
> > freezes leading
> > up to GNOME 2.18).
> >
> > It's probably safest to check out of the GNOME 2.18 branch (unless you 
> > like living on the
> > bleeding edge 8-) ).
> >
> > % svn co svn+ssh://svn.gnome.org/svn/orca/branches/gnome-2-18
> > _______________________________________________
> > Orca-list mailing list
> > Orca-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
> >     
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