Re: [boost] [1.36.0] Libraries with unmerged changes?

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-07-14 18:33:53

James Sharpe wrote:
> Beman,
> 
> I'm calling into question the decisions you've made with regards to where
> you start a new branch for a release from in the light of the fact that you
> are diffing against trunk. To me it seems like you are making a lot of work
> for yourself and maintainers by requiring that changes get merged from trunk
> to release, with release having been based upon the previous release. If
> you're only then going to diff against trunk for differences then why not
> just start from trunk in the first place and revert commits that are
> destined for the next release? Seems to me like you'd have a much easier job
> and people wouldn't need to worry so much about merging before the deadline;
> all they'd have to ensure is that there changes are in trunk before the
> release branch creation date and then it would simply be a case of reverting
> features that aren't destined for the release. I think this would be a
> smaller workload for creating releases, as then the remainder of the time
> can be spent patching the release to remove regressions.
> 
> What are people's thoughts on the matter?

These weren't my personal decisions. They were discussed at length over 
a long period of time to try to overcome the problems of the approach 
used prior to 1.35.0. I doubt you will find much support for going back 
to the old "wild west" trunk and then branch approach. It just didn't 
work for Boost.

--Beman