[Gdal-dev] RFC 3: GDAL Commiter Guildlines

[Marek Brudka]

Hi,

Practice:

"When committing new features or significant changes to existing source 
code, the committer should take reasonable measures to insure that the 
source code continues to build and work on the most commonly supported 
platforms (currently Linux and Windows), either by testing on those 
platforms directly, running buildbot tests, or by getting help from 
other developers working on those platforms."

sounds good, but is rather impractical. SVN is a kind of "communication 
medium" between developers and operating systems. Moving manually files 
between Linux/Windows to make tests as well as sending/receiving sources 
to/from developers always lead to troubles with versions/line ends etc. 
Moreover, efforts related with "new features or significant changes" 
usually require a lot of additional work which should be versioned by it 
own. A common practice for this case is to create and work on a private 
branch in repository. I propose then to modify the recommendation in the 
following way:

"New features or significant changes to existing source code should be 
commited to separate private branches. Merging to the main trunk is 
allowed only after testing them by separate developers on various 
platforms."


BTW. I do not think, that the requirement to have all branches 
compilable and valid is reasonable. It is enough the have good sources 
in the main trunk and/or in some important public branches.

Marek