kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

FWIW, as someone who is also maintaining parallel feature branches, I agree
with Orson and John.  Now that we have committed to this 5.1 idea, we
should just make it happen in master.  I think if we keep both master and
5.1 branch running in parallel, inevitably one or the other of them will be
less tested / more broken unless people spend a bunch of time doing the
work of keeping them synchronized manually.  The cost of this doesn't seem
to outweigh the benefit of being able to merge some 6.0 features into
master sooner.

On Thu, Jul 19, 2018 at 11:03 AM John Beard <john.j.beard@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 19, 2018 at 1:47 PM, Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> > Unless we are going to prohibit new features (new file formats, new tool
> > framework for eeschema, etc.) from being merged into the dev branch
> > until 5.1 is released, I disagree.  If we want to only work on 5.1 in
> > the dev branch, then I'm OK with this proposal.
>
> This is essentially my proposal - limit dev branch changes to 5.1
> features, uncontroversial maintenance and bugfixes.
>
> If people want to work on features for 6 now, that can be done in
> separate branches, and the onus for keeping it rebased onto the 5.1
> changes is on them, rather than forcing the 5.1 workers to deal with
> conflicts. Otherwise, whoever is working on 5.1 features like the
> GTK3/GAL stuff and printing, will have to continually port their work
> between the two branches.
>
> If 5.1 changes are unlikely to be substantially affected by 6.0-facing
> changes, then perhaps this limitation is not useful.
>
> > There should be nothing in the 5.1 branch that is not also in the dev
> > branch so everything in the 5.1 branch should be tested in the dev
> > branch builds.
>
> In theory, yes, but if fixes need to be manually ported as the
> branches diverge, it's possible to fail to fix, or break in new ways,
> one branch or the other. If a 5.1 branch exists in parallel to 6.0,
> someone will have to take responsibility to ensure the appropriate
> fixes are identified, ported and tested as needed. In the Linux world,
> this is the unglamorous, arduous (and vital) job of the stable branch
> maintainers.
>
> I'm not against parallel branches if someone is willing to step up to
> be a stable branch maintainer for 5.1. In fact, I'd be thrilled to get
> nice new stuff dropping into the dev branch. However, changes that
> need to be in both branches are not trivially rebasable, that job will
> soon become decidedly not-fun.
>
> Cheers,
>
> John
>
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