[OpenLayers-Dev] MOTION: delete old branches

[Greg Troxel]

Eric Lemoine <eric.lemoine at camptocamp.com> writes:

> It seems to me that we could start with a simple model: the "master"
> branch for development (as we do today), and temporary release
> branches for preparing releases. Temporary release branches are
> created from "master" for x.y releases, or from a release tags for
> x.y.z releases.

That's what I do (in a very large private project), which seems to be
the simplest sane workflow in a project with more than a handful of
people (and not different from what you'd do in svn):

  master is for development, but supposed to be stable

  feature branches are created for things not ready for master

    when a feature branch is ready, master is merged to it, and if
    regression tests pass, it's been reviewed, etc. it can be merged to
    master
     
  release branch created for a release (off master)

    release branch is tested, RCs published, etc.

    any fixes are applied to release and cherrypicked (cherry-pick -x)
    to master (or to master and cherrypicked to release)

  release is tagged

and it seems openlayers people want to:

  delete release branch reference because their presence is annoying in
  UIs

Whether or not branch references persist is entirely separate from
whether it's ok to do work on release branches that is not on master.


Alternatively, if the community wants to freeze master during release
periods, then releases can just be a tag along master with no release
branches.  gpsd does this.

If branches are created, I would suggest keeping each branch reference
at least until the release leaves "security bugs will be fixed with a
point release" status and enters "this is crufty; code historian use
only" status.

As for other large projects not having release branches, IMHO openlayers
is not special and the other projects are all behaving oddly.  NetBSD
(in CVS still) has branches netbsd-{2,3,4,5} for 2.0/2.1, 3.0/3.1
etc. and also e.g. netbsd-5-0 for point fixes to 5.0 (as 5.0.1 etc), and
so on.  These persist, even though now there is little interest in 2.x.
But, CVS doesn't have an easy "show me all the branches UI.

Perhaps the other projects are in a "keep tags, and delete branch refs
because they annoy us in the UI" mode.
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