Stable branch reformatting issues

[Jeremy Huddleston]

On Mar 19, 2012, at 3:01 PM, Chase Douglas <chase.douglas at canonical.com> wrote:

> On 03/19/2012 12:06 PM, Jeremy Huddleston wrote:
>> Ok, well I'd like to definitely do this with 1.12 since it will make cherry picking from master *much* less painful.
>> 
>> Not doing it on 1.11 and 1.10 will mean that it will be difficult to cherry-pick back to those branches (which means they just won't get certain fixes that they previously would have due to lack of manpower).  So as I see it, we either leave stable-1.10-branch exactly where it is from now until eternity because we don't reformat it to take cherry picks or we reformat it to allow it to take cherry picks.  If you want the former, then there's nothing really stopping you from "pretending" and using the <reformat commit>^ commit as your base.
> 
> If I understand correctly, you're basically saying that you are
> unwilling to maintain stable branches that are not reformatted.

AIUI, we (X.org) only actively maintain and support one stable branch at a time.  That means that right now, we're supporting server-1.12-branch as the stable branch.  It makes sense that the reformatting happen on the 1.12 branch at the same time as master since they are both exactly the same at this point (modulo version number).

In the past, I've occasionally cherry-picked patches into even older branches where non-trivial.  If the older branches are not similarly adjusted, cherry-picking will become non-trivial more frequently, so those cherry-picks will be less frequent and will likely be based on "more bang for the buck" since the time cost for such a c-p increases from 5 seconds to 10 minutes.

> Since
> you are the one donating time to maintaining the stable branches, it's
> up to you how you want to do it. I just have my doubts on how much it
> will be of use to downstreams.

If server-1.10-branch and server-1.11-branch (ie: the "old" branches) don't get reformatted, they'll get less cherry-picks (just based on economics), and I feel that will be of bigger impact downstream.

> There's still some use in a reformatted tree even if some downstreams
> don't reformat: keeping in sync with upstream changes. We can take
> individual changes from the stable tree and deformat them, which will
> ensure that we have the same fixes as everyone else.

Yeah... we can certainly have a server-1.11.4-branch (or some other name) which allows you to maintain a centralized branch pre-reformatting.  It will have less cherry-picks than the main server-1.11-branch (or at least lag behind it a bit), but it may be helpful to distros in your situation.