The root of this problem, and it's not one that can be dealt with in the short term, is because we are treating trunk as basically the "stable" branch for "stable" releases.  Most mature projects have a separate branch for every major release point where things are either known to work or known to not work, and they concentrate mostly on bugfixes that do not add new functionality or break existing ones or security patches.  This lets them break trunk as needed and as another major point release comes up, they take some care to make sure trunk is at least in good enough shape to branch to create the new release.  We can't do this, since major lower level components change too fast.  This would be akin to us still be patching the 0.3.0 codebase, which would mean using the pre-rewrote kernel.  And not having sound.  And who knows how many other nice things that have been added so far.  Thus for the short term, we're stuck with trunk acting as both the point of development and release.  Not an ideal situation.
 
Ged is actually right when he says we actually don't have a need to create entire branches for a release, we could just tag and release.  The only thing stopping us is we add in some hacks to work around known issues, hacks that we don't want leaking into trunk.  That and we revert some random stuff here and there that are actually correct but break other incorrect things.
 
Breaking things is pretty much unavoidable, even if completely unintended.  Which is probably why yarotows and other branches were created, since these are efforts to add new functionality into ReactOS.  That is always going to bring risks.  But we need that new functionality if we're to get to a point where we can actually have a genuine "stable" branch instead of constantly releasing off of trunk.
 
This basically boils down to, for now, get all the risky stuff in right after a branch is made for release.  That way we can see quickly what breaks and not suddenly have to deal with locking of trunk right before release because people waited to commit their work or we delayed doing a winesync and Wine did something to break our code.
On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 5:40 AM, victor martinez <vicmarcal@hotmail.com> wrote:


> From: gedmurphy@gmail.com

> To: ros-dev@reactos.org
> Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2010 08:09:57 +0100

> Subject: Re: [ros-dev] 0.3.12 milestones status
>
> victor Martinez wrote:
>
> > In the same way, and imho, I think it is much better
> > to avoid sending critical code one month before the release.
>
> This isn't how you release.
> The whole point in branching for a release is so you can stabalise the
> branch whilst trunk continues to be 'bleeding edge'
> What's the point in branching otherwise? We may as well just tag trunk and
> do away with branching.


I am not agree :) As far as i see we have tried to (more or less)stabilize trunk before branching at least in the 2 latest releases. An i.e is the 0.3.12 release, if we are following the "bleeding edge" concept then we should have branched several months ago and just pulled the regression fixes from trunk to the branch. Our approach was different: Stabilizing trunk fixing the known regressions (which,btw,were marked as Milestones) and then branching.


There is not an incompatibility with the "stabilizing trunk" and "branching" concepts. First because exists the "Hack-releases" (fixes just applied for the release) and that just can be done in a branch. Second because a (more or less) stabilized trunk doesn't mean a regression-free trunk (but it could be).


The first main advantage (about avoid sending critical code in the month we are going to release) is that we will have a whole month to check  if the critical changes has waken up underlying bugs (or if the critical changes has introduced Eisenbugs).If we are following the "bleeding edge" approach  we can just pray to find those Eisenbugs in the Release Candidate ISO tests and, since there aren't a lot of testers checking the RC ISO, it is quite unprovable.


The second main advantage is that we reduce the Release Engineers amount of work. It is not the same bugging them to create just one RC ISO than bugging them to create 2 or 3 because playing with the "bleeding edge" concept. 
 





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