[Koha-devel] A Discussion on A Policy Setting Forth Standards of Code Submission, etc.

[Chris Cormack]

On 3 November 2010 11:10, Paul Poulain <paul.poulain at biblibre.com> wrote:
> Le 02/11/2010 23:05, Chris Cormack a écrit :
>>> I think we (all) failed because Koha 3.2 was 9 months late. Well, in
>>> fact, I think the mistake was not to branch 3.4 immediatly on feature
>>> freeze. That would have been much less pain for us (that are
>>> customer-planning driven) (suggestion below).
>>>
>> What would have caused much much much less pain for you, was to
>> develop your features in small branches, rather than one monolithic
>> branch which makes rebasing much harder than it needs to be.
>>
>> This is a lesson that cannot be overstated, topic/bug/feature branches
>> make everyones lives much easier. And they mean that if one feature is
>> rejected ... then the whole stack doesn't need to be.
>>
> agreed: we made a mistake here. (and don't plan to do it again !)
>> I don't think branching sooner or an earlier release would have helped
>> anywhere near as much as developing in smaller branches, not one huge
>> one.
>>
> Partially agreeing, I'd like to discuss of this topic on the next IRC
> meeting, i'm not fully sure I see clearly the best path (branching too
> early means that bugfix patches would have to be done on both branches)
>
Branching 3.2 earlier, in no way takes away the need to rebase, and so
having smaller branches to rebase is still a much bigger win than a
big branch to rebase. Branching earlier would not have meant the
patches were anymore likely to go into master than they are now, they
still have to go through QA etc, and having them in small feature set
branches makes the chances of them passing much more likely.

We can talk about this more at the meeting, but I am of the firm
opinion branching earlier would have been of very little help in your
situation.  That's not to say its a bad idea, I just don't think it
would have solved your problem.

Chris