openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Phil Frost <indigo@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'd like to propose a workflow enhancement related to bzr branching and 
new feature development. A problem with the way bzr stores history makes 
it difficult to cherry-pick changes [1]. This is really a problem when 
backporting bugfixes or new features.

A sited solution in the bug case is DaggyFixes[2]. Basically, the idea 
is when making a bugfix, branch from the revision that introduced the 
error, instead of whatever the head of trunk happens to be at the 
moment. This has the advantage of making it clear by looking at the 
branch graph which revisions have the bug, where it started, and where 
it was fixed. More importantly, it means that the bugfix branch can be 
merged into any other branch which might have indirectly inherited the 
bug without resorting to cherry-picking.

I'd like to propose a similar workflow for new features. Here's a 
particular problem it would solve: I'm deploying 7.0, and my business 
can't do without check writing. The account_check_writing module in 7.0 
and 6.1 is hardly useful. Fortunately, a much better check writing 
module has been written in 
lp:~openerp-dev/openobject-addons/trunk-account_check_writing_jam. 
However, it was branched from trunk, and includes several revisions that 
merge yet more changes from trunk. Now if I merge this into my branch of 
7.0, I also get a bunch of unrelated changes from trunk I don't want. I 
can exclude them with cherry-picks, but then the branch history gets all 
goofed up and bzr merges do weird things.

Since this branch doesn't change anything outside the 
account_check_writing module, and it doesn't actually depend on any 
functionality not released in 7.0, it's an ideal candidate for this 
workflow. Had this feature branch been made from the point where 7.0 
diverged from trunk, then it could cleanly be merged into trunk, and 
also into 7.0 for people who want to expressly backport it to their 
local configurations.

Thoughts?

[1] http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/CherryPick
[2] http://monotone.ca/wiki/DaggyFixes/