dolfin team mailing list archive

["Matthew Knepley" <knepley@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > Otherwise a simple solution where I think everyone would be happy
> > would be to have one branch where the kernel is stable which is used
> > to develop modules/applications (since they won't sabotage eachother),
> > and one branch where the kernel is unstable, but where very little
> > application development is done (perhaps only a few simple test
> > cases). The two branches could then be merged at regular intervals (at
> > releases for example).
>
> Do you mean that we maintain a separate branch that only gets bug fixes
> between releases? This would of course be good to have, but then we need
> someone to maintain it. Do you want to maintain such a branch? We could
> put it in a separate repository (which could replace dolfin-kth) and be
> named something more official, like dolfin-stable.

We can, of course, talk about this at the FEniCS meeting, but I thought I would
make a point here. We do maintain this exact thing for PETSc. At each release,
we tag the main development branch, then clone (branch) that to
another repository.
All bug fixes are done in that repository, and then applied to the
main line by pulling
(patching) from the release repo and integrating the change. Its not
hard and has
saved us loads of trouble since we started doing it (and its easy with
Mercurial :)).

  Matt
--
"Failure has a thousand explanations. Success doesn't need one" -- Sir
Alec Guiness