Merging to the release_1_6 branch

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 29, 2008, at 03:11, Caspar Florian Ebeling wrote:

>> I think the amount of work to use a branch is overestimated.  It's  
>> not hard and
>> very easy and safer then having everything in trunk and then  
>> having to do code
>> freezes.
>
> I think the amount of time passed since the 1.6.0 release and the
> amount of time since
> 1.6.1 is vaporware, combined with rumors that 1_6 or 1_7 branches  
> contains
> stuff that did not go into trunk make this claim a bit questionable.
>
> I can only second Jordan's position here. I do used trunk, and it
> works quite well.
> Why not just push it out to users, and forget about bureaucracy of  
> branches?
> Having many bugs out there is much less professional than not using  
> branches.

I've been using trunk for months. Trunk recently received many nice  
fixes from jmr which it would be great to release to everyone. On the  
other hand, I practically never used the 1.6 branch (with its  
modifications since the 1.6.0 release). I don't know that it works  
right.

The changes on the 1.6.0 branch were to address problems with the dmg  
installer, which those of us building from source are not testing.  
Doesn't trunk have a different fix for the dmg issue? Most of us  
haven't tested that either.

I would be in favor of examining the commits that were made to the  
1.6 branch since the release of 1.6.0 to see what needs to be merged  
back to trunk. Then we could release a set of 1.7.0-rc1 disk images.  
We should make sure the dmg installer properly sets up the .profile  
on all five supported configurations (Panther PowerPC, Tiger PowerPC  
and Intel, Leopard PowerPC and Intel). Let people run 1.7.0-rc1 for a  
few weeks and make sure no major issues are reported, then release it  
as 1.7.0.