dolfin team mailing list archive

[Johan Jansson <jjan@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Oct 26, 2006 at 10:47:39PM +0200, logg@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 26, 2006 at 05:06:21PM +0200, Anders Logg wrote:
> >> I have just two concerns:
> >>
> >>   1. I would like to see more people helping out with general
> >>   development and maintenance.
> >
> > Yes, I think we all do.
> >
> >>   2. I would like changes to be propagated to the main tree in
> >>   small pieces (if they are not independent) so I know what is
> >>   happening and get a chance to influence the development.
> >
> > Do you mean in the kernel or in all modules/applications as well? I
> > think it would be counter-productive to demand that application
> > developers have to submit to a certain check-in schedule (piece by
> > piece).
> 
> Just the kernel. I certainly won't mind any big updates to the elasticity
> or Navier-Stokes modules.

Ok, that's good.

> 
> > 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.
> 

Yes, only bugfixes are allowed in the kernel. But the idea is also
that modules/applications are developed against dolfin-stable (because
that development requires a stable kernel). This is assuming that
modules/applications are supposed to exist in DOLFIN at all, and not
be separate. But I think we had consensus that that was a good idea,
since we want to move away from having separate "solvers" for every
equation.

I can maintain dolfin-stable, no problem. It will result in less total
work for me compared to not having a dolfin-stable.

  Johan