[Opensim-dev] Stable Branch pt III Was: RFC: Changing default script engine to xengine

[Ryan McDougall]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 2:58 PM, Sean Dague <sdague at gmail.com> wrote:
> Kyle Hamilton wrote:
>> I wish trunk would be incrementally more useful and incrementally less
>> unstable at every revision.  Unfortunately, this is obviously a
>> pipe-dream.
>
> The ability to break things in trunk is what lets it evolve so quickly.
>  I do realize that everyone wants both "all the features" and "all the
> stability" at the same time, but I'm a realist, and that's just not
> possible in OpenSim at this point.  We're at least a year out from 1.0
> which will start to have that.
>
>> I'd like to see a 'stable' branching system of some kind, and every
>> time there's a new stable candidate I'd like to see a diff produced
>> and examined for Justin's 2 weeks to see if there's anything that's
>> obviously broken between the former stable and the new candidate.
>> Once it's determined to be stable enough, it would get committed to
>> trunk and a new -stable branch forked from that revision.
>>
>> Two downsides to this suggestion is that it means that everyone's
>> going to need to become really familiar with the process of re-basing
>> their local copy, and everyone's going to need to listen to the
>> release coordinator to know when to re-base their locals.  The former
>> is a documentation problem (write a page on the wiki to describe how
>> to do it); the latter is an announcement problem.  (I'd suggest the
>> creation of a new opensim-announce list that only the release
>> coordinator(s) can send to, and which has a membership list precisely
>> equal to the opensim-dev list?  This would allow the announcements to
>> be handled separately, but allow memberships to be handled only by a
>> single administration request... but I don't know how good of an idea
>> it is.)
>
> The problem with proposing something that causes someone else work, is
> it is likely to not happen.  If you are signing up to do a lot of said
> work, I applaud you. :)  If you are suggesting others do it... the
> suggest is always welcomed, but don't be too surprised if it doesn't
> come to fruition.

That is true, and to be successful we really need to minimize unnecessary work.

However when it comes to making real production-ready software, its a
matter of professionalism and duty to commit to a certain set of
disciplines. Cross platform, security, documentation, testing,
branching, they're all something that isn't necessarily fun, but is
something we must do to have a code-base worth using.

We'll need a stable branch at some point. The only question is the
precise form of it.

At the risk of dead-horse beating, I like having only one active
branch, in stable/unstable cycles.

Cheers,

>
>        -Sean
>
> --
> Sean Dague / Neas Bade
> sdague at gmail.com
> http://dague.net
>
>
>
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