[ruby-core:40762] Re: Proposal for sustainable branch maintenance

Hello,

2011/11/6 Jon <[e-mail]>:
> What do you mean by "active branches"?=A0 Should the "Branch Statuses" ch=
art
> at
>
> =A0=A0=A0 http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/projects/ruby/wiki/ReleaseEngineer=
ing
>
> be updated so that everyone is clear as to which branches are considered
> active? "Frozen" doesn't clearly convey "active".

Indeed the word "Frozen" is misleading.

The article shows the branch status in terms of release engineering.
"Frozen" means that the branch is supervised by release manager.

  - no new feature must be committed to the branch (feature freeze)
  - any bug-fix can be committed to the branch after the release
    manager reviews the patch
  - no one must not commit anything directly to the branch (except
    case where release manager admitted)

The "frozen" branch is being maintained by the branch manager after
the branch is released.  The word "frozen" is no longer appropriate.

Historically, the release manager and branch manager have been the
same person (=3D Yugui).  As Yugui said, the branch maintenance (by
one person) is very hard task; this is one of reasons why 1.9 release
tended to be late.


> Also, what do you think non-committers can do to help you parallelize the
> backport bottlenecks?=A0 At the end of the day it's always going to be a
> commiter who has to review, approve, and backport so as to ensure stabili=
ty.
> But perhaps those of us who regularly build MRI can help offload at least
> part of the work.

Thank you.  I think non-committer can do some helpful contribution:.

First, please register backport ticket if you notice it is not
registered.  When the committers fixed a bug in trunk, they will be
satisfied and must forget to register backport ticket.

And, please "bump" backport ticket if you want the bug fix.  It is
one of hard tasks for branch maintainer to determine if the patch is
important or not (If it seems unimportant, the backport may be skipped
to reduce possiblity of regression).  So, the information that "there
are some people who have actual difficulty without the patch" is very
helpful for branch maintainer.

Daily testing of branch is helpful of course; if you cannot build the
"frozen" branch, or if you notice a new failure/error, please report
it.


> From that perspective, I don't
> yet see how non-committers can really help with the backports bottleneck
> other than perhaps testing `trunk` patches against their favorite "active=
"
> branch and reporting status in a backport request.

If you do such a hard contribution sustainably, you will become a
comitter :-)

--=20
Yusuke Endoh <[e-mail]>