On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 01:12:58PM -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
On 04/26/2012 12:39 PM, Cole Robinson wrote:
Hi all,
An idea we've kicked around for awhile in Red Hat/Fedora land is doing official libvirt stable releases, but nothing ever took shape. The idea was brought up again recently and I've offered to help get something going.
I've pushed an upstream v0.9.11-maint branch with a bunch of patches cherry-picked to libvirt 0.9.11. Shortly I'll be cutting a 0.9.11.1 and pushing it to the website, like other releases.
How often do you plan to cut releases on the current maint branch? Once a month or so?
What's the preferred method for marking a patch as a candidate for inclusion on the branch?
Right now, it looks like we are using cherry-pick -x to populate the branch; maybe someday it would be worth swapping over to the style used by the kernel where you base candidate patches directly off the stable branch, then merge the branch into master for development, so that master is always a superset of all commits in stable; but that implies using a merge paradigm whereas our current style is that mainline is linear history. Food for thought, but certainly not anything worth changing right away until we have more experience with how popular the stable branch turns out to be.
One reason why the kernel does that is that their master can be quite a fast changing place & potentially unstable, so hard to track when you are doing development. Conceptually though I don't really like that because of the non-linearity of history and the horrificness of merge commits[1]. In any case I think our 'master' branch is stable enough that it does not cause too many problems for people developing new patches. Daniel [1] My dislike of merge commits has grown tremendously having worked on OpenStack now. Navigating history & tracking down regressions is so much more unpleasant with merges. -- |: http://berrange.com -o- http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: http://entangle-photo.org -o- http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|