Re: [boost] 1.35 release approach (was [1.34.0] Deadline)

From: Doug Gregor (dgregor_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-05-02 08:54:33

On May 2, 2007, at 8:37 AM, Peter Dimov wrote:

> David Abrahams wrote:
>> on Tue May 01 2007, "Peter Dimov" <pdimov-AT-mmltd.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Jeff Garland wrote:
>>>
>>>> BTW, I don't know if this has been discussed much, but the plan for
>>>> subversion switchover, as I understand it, is to take 1.34 as the
>>>> svn HEAD and force all work unstable stuff on the CVS HEAD to be
>>>> brought over using the new process.
>>>
>>> That would be very impolite. :-)
>>
>> I'm not sure this transition *can* be a "polite" process if it's  
>> going
>> to work.  That said, I'm open to suggestions.
>
> Let me get this straight... you will be throwing all of my  
> post-1.34 changes
> away with the transition? What are the expected benefits of this move?

The current CVS HEAD would go into a branch in Subversion (say,  
branches/post-1.34-head). The 1.34.0 release branch would become the  
development branch. Of course, developers will need to merge changes  
over from branches/post-1.34-head to the development branch.

Yes, it's a pain. However, my experience with managing the 1.33  
release series (and watching the 1.34 release series) tells me that  
this is the right way forward. With each release, effort has gone  
into bug-fixes for the release branch while HEAD has become the Wild  
West, literally falling apart in the interim. It took months of  
stabilizing HEAD to get to the point where we could branch the 1.33  
release, many more months to to re-stabilize HEAD for the 1.34  
release, and the time is proportional to the time that the release  
branch is active. How long will it take to stabilize HEAD post-1.34?  
If we're going to break the cycle of longer and longer releases, we  
need to start each release from a clean slate... which means, in this  
case, starting from the previous release and carefully merging  
changes over from post-1.34-head to the development branch.

        - Doug