[vlc-devel] Re: vlc: svn commit r17510 (md)

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le dimanche 12 novembre 2006 20:45, Christophe Mutricy a écrit :
> > Which gives no assurance that the fix will actually work with the
> > branch. My primary focus is to get bugs resolved for 0.8.6 release.
>
> I thought the branch was more stable than the trunk and so new things
> should be tested in trunk (and we all know how much the encoding
> problem can be tricky (contrats to you and courmish to look after
> it))
>
> > I don't have time to test everything twice (i.e. both trunk and
> > branch).
>
> Well you will still need to test when you commit to trunk. So the
> time spent is the same.

I would personnaly support a only-backport policy to the "stable" 
branch. Committing to the branch first raises quite a lot of problems:

* It's difficult to track unless commited to the trunk immediatly (which 
kills the only documented benefit of being faster). If you don't commit 
to trunk, other people will assume it is not for trunk, and we will end 
up duplicating bug fixing efforts.
* The commit log for trunk, which means for every future releases become 
full of "forward port [xxxxx]" which are quite helpless messages.
* We have now seen new features being added to the branch, and of 
course, there were bugs there... "Not having (corporate?) time" is not 
an excuse for wasting the time of other contributors, be they paid or 
volunteers. In the end, this only delays the release of both 0.8.6 and 
0.9.0.
* There has also been cases of accidental reverse commit on trunk when 
people merge patches from the branch badly (such as by copying files 
instead of using svn merge). More time wasted.


Only branch-specific fixes should go to the branch without going through 
trunk. Of course, translation files are a special exception.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
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