Re: Beyond GCC 3.0

[Kamil Iskra <kamil at science dot uva dot nl>]

On Thu, 28 Jun 2001, Richard Kenner wrote:

> Instead, I'd suggest that the release branch be made at the end of month 4
> and the mainline be reopened at that point.  So what we have in the
> steady-state are the following periods, each of which have two simultaneous
> development processes:
>
> - months 1 & 2
>     stability fixes on the release branch from the last release
>     same as your proposal ("free for all") on the mainline
> - months 3 & 4
>     possibility of a second "dot" release on the release branch
>     same as your proposal ("hack on") on mainline
> - months 5 & 6
>     new release branch fork for stabilization
>     "free for all" on the mainline

In the original plan of Mark, the average lifetime of a branch was
something like 4 months, and a new branch was created every 6 months.
This was a guarantee of the stability of the whole processes.

In the process that you suggest, a new branch is spawned every 4 months,
while the lifetime of the branch can easily be 5-6 months.  This is an
unstable system, it could even lead to paradoxical situations where a new
branch is spawned before any release is made from the previous one.

Unless I misunderstood you and you suggest to spawn a new branch every two
cycles, i.e. every 8 months.  But then one could question the usefulness
of the first "hack on" period, since it wouldn't be followed by a branch.
Although such a periodic "cooling off", even if not followed by a branch,
could improve the stability I guess...

Just my f0.02...

-- 
Kamil Iskra                 http://www.science.uva.nl/~kamil/
Section Computational Science, Faculty of Science, Universiteit van Amsterdam
kamil@science.uva.nl  tel. +31 20 525 75 35  fax. +31 20 525 74 90
Kruislaan 403  room F.202  1098 SJ Amsterdam  The Netherlands