[python-committers] Is 3.1 open?

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Nick Coghlan wrote:
> Benjamin Peterson wrote:
>> 2010/3/17 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com>:
>>> Short version: SVN and other non-DVCS systems don't store enough (or the
>>> right) metadata to support merging properly, so branching becomes
>>> unnecessarily painful.
>> This isn't really true these days given svn merge --reintegrate.
> 
> File renaming/moving still doesn't work properly though:
> http://blogs.open.collab.net/svn/2008/07/subversion-merg.html
> 
> There are limits to what you can do without tracking the original
> changesets. A DVCS does that, but SVN works by calculating diffs between
> different revisions without really caring about how those revisions came
> about.

While that may be true in general, it is irrelevant in the context where
you brought it up - whether or not we could do release branches with
subversion.

My expectation is that the release process won't change in this respect
after the switch to Mercurial. We will continue to freeze the
maintenance branch for releases, because everything else is too tedious
for the release manager.

E.g. let's assume the proposal would be to create a clone of the
repository for the release branch: the time it takes to create a clone
is too large to make it acceptable for the release manager to wait for
that to complete.

Regards,
Martin