[spambayes-dev] More CVS branch/tags questions

[Richie Hindle]

[Kenny]
> Have you ever seen this become an issue if the new line of development
> does decide to do a significant refactoring of the code?

No, not really.  Either the code has moved so you get a conflict and have
to hand-merge, which is no harder than with any other branch management
scheme, or the bugfix is no longer meaningful because the code has gone
away, so you just take the version from the head.

[Skip]
> My take on this is that at this point in time we should not be working on
> any branches.  Everything should happen on the trunk until a release is
> about the be cut, at which point a branch is made, then frozen except for
> crucial bug fixes.  

That's fair enough as long we're happy to release new features with every
release.  As I understood it, at the time we had lots of new features in
the pipeline *and* a need to release some bugfixes.  Perhaps the features
should have gone onto a branch and the trunk remained the place to do
bugfixes - we also do that, and it's no problem.  People developing
significant new features get all the benefits of source control without
stepping on the toes of the other developers or the release process.

[Anthony]
> Note that you can also just use cvs diff to apply the fix by hand to both
> the trunk and the branch. This is likely to cause less pain, as you're
> then relying on less cvs magic.

CVS is good at this kind of thing as long as you give it enough help
(managing tags and branches sensibly) - I'd rather let CVS do the heavy
lifting than do it by hand.

All that said, the branch strategy you use is far less important than
letting everyone know what it is!  I don't have a big axe to grind about
this - spambayes isn't (yet) a big enough project for the choice of branch
strategy to be critical.  Our failure this time, if there even was a
failure, was in not advertising the strategy loudly enough.

[Anthony]
> OTOH, I don't know what is stopping us from cutting 1.0b1 in a couple of 
> weeks, with a possible RC a couple of weeks after that. 

The DBRunRecoveryError problem is stopping us, IMHO.  Stephen Harper
posted to the spambayes list yesterday with a possible method for
reproducing that
(http://mail.python.org/pipermail/spambayes/2003-November/009021.html)
which I need to find time to look into.

-- 
Richie Hindle
richie at entrian.com