Merging to the release_1_6 branch

[Rainer Müller]

Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> On May 27, 2008, at 1:38 PM, Rainer Müller wrote:
> 
>> Jordan brings up the idea not to use branches at all, but to make  
>> releases from the main line. [ ... ] How would we do minor releases  
>> for bugfixes without branches?
> 
> Easy.  In Subversion, tags and branches are the same thing - it's just  
> a matter of convention.  If you need to do minor releases for anything  
> you've already released, you just promote your release tag to a branch  
> and start checking in everything on that branch.  You create it on- 
> demand, in other words, and if you never need to make a minor release  
> then that release tag just stays a tag.

Hm, this sounds like you propose here to make release branches without 
using tags. Branching off a release from trunk, but never do any tags. 
Or tagging and break the immutability of the tag by changing it. 
Whatever, but this makes it more clear what you mean.

But tagging releases wouldn't harm, would it?

What I didn't like about your initial proposal was the "convergence 
period" which I interpreted to put trunk into code freeze. In my 
opinion, you should branch off the release if you think the current 
feature set in trunk would make a good release and stabilize the code on 
this release branch. Then you roll the release. And that all while work 
on trunk continues as normal.

> You've yet to raise an issue which suggests anything but unfamiliarity  
> with the process, Rainer.
Yes, I admit that I may be unfamiliar with every way of software 
development used out there and that I am not so good by understanding 
your proposal which was just made up of one sentence. I know the 
"standard" way with trunk, branches and tags as I use Subversion for 
some years. You didn't elaborate much in your first mail how you want to 
do it.

But how do you solve my initial question? Who should merge patches to 
the release branch (or call it tag)? In my opinion the same issue occurs 
here.

What we have now on release_1_6 and trunk is a case where we can't 
introduce another scheme of doing branches right now. We need a solution 
how to do it for 1.6.x and can then maybe decide to use another way for 
1.7.x.

Rainer