[python-committers] [PSF-Members] Code Simplicity » Open Source Community, Simplified

[R. David Murray]

On Fri, 04 Feb 2011 13:25:54 +0100, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> > The problem now is that patches in the development branch are
> > "forgotten" and not backported when appropiate
> 
> Sorry, do you have real examples of this?

I can't point you at specific examples, but I remember reading issues
where the comment was made that a fix had been "forgotten".  Sometimes
it gets into a point release, sometimes it gets forgotten until after
the minor version goes into security mode.

I think this happened most when people were relying on other people
doing mass merges, when the mass merges stopped happening, but I'm
not sure.

> > If we up-port, no patch is forgotten. The rule should be: "patches in
> > n+1 are a SUPERSET of patches in n". With this rule, mercurial takes
> > care of everything (a patch in n+1 can 'undo' a patch up-ported from n,
> > if needed, keeping the rule).
> 
> That's a theoretical and IMO naïve point of view. In practice, there are
> many changesets that will not "up-port" cleanly and will need manual
> work. The work will not be much less than with down-porting.

As Nick pointed it, it is much worse to forget to forward port a patch
than to forget to back port it.  We have had a few of the former even with
our current workflow, and it is really embarrassing when it happens[*].

--
R. David Murray                                      www.bitdance.com

[*] And I can reference you to one mistake, where the Mercurial-style
workflow was used: at one point the version number of the email package
was bumped in a release candidate branch but the bump wasn't forward
ported to the mainline.