[Xorg] X.org CVS branches need to change

[Keith Packard]

Around 14 o'clock on Mar 15, Harold L Hunt II wrote:



> 1) A lot of new patches are being committed *only* to XORG-RELEASE-1. 
> These patches will be lost of XORG-RELEASE-1 is not merged back to 
> XORG-CURRENT.

My thought was that we would merge XORG-RELEASE-1 back to HEAD and then 
continue development from there.  That's the main purpose of starting this 
discussion; when we do decide to do this, it's very important that 
everyone who uses CVS knows about the plan.  We can fix the XORG-RELEASE-1 
branch so that people checking code out will be informed abou the change, 
but we can't prevent people from committing patches to the branch.  
Everyone will have to switch at the same time, which will take a bit of 
coordination.

I look at the current branching scheme as an experiment with a more
sophisticated system used by another project.  I'm always willing to try
another approach, but I think we've learned that this particular approach
isn't what we want.  My proposal is really just another such experiment,
although the new hypothesis has been strengthened by prior experience.  At
some point we'll stop changing things around and live with what we've got.
At least, I hope this will happen...

> Additionally, I think that we would be served just fine by a system in 
> which a person or group of people can elect to form their own branch if 
> they know that they have development work that requires a branch, but 
> that everything else should occur on HEAD.

The one caveat here is that when approaching a release, we may elect to
branch some development that would normally go right to HEAD to avoid
branching for the relase early in the process.  Again, the precise timing
of the branch is tricky, and should be guided by what will probably be less
work overall.

If people are happy with the new plan, we need to figure out how to get 
from where we are to where we want to be, and who is going to do the work.
I'm no CVS master, so if someone else wants to volunteer, that would be 
fine by me.

We've got lots of tags in the tree:

	IPv6-REVIEW-BASE
        XORG-RELEASE-1-TM-BASE
        XORG-RELEASE-1-TM
        IPv6-REVIEW
        XORG-RELEASE-1-BASE
        XORG-RELEASE-1
        CYGWIN
        XORG-STABLE
        XORG-CURRENT

I guess the question is which of these are active and how we can get them 
merged back together.

I don't see any need for a CYGWIN branch at all; branches shouldn't be 
permanent obstacles to getting changes onto HEAD, rather they should 
provide a staging ground for significant new changes which need a bit of 
work before getting applid to HEAD.  Simple fixes for Cygwin/X, and 
changes to files used only by Cygwin/X should go right to HEAD.

I don't know if any changes have been applied to XORG-CURRENT or 
XORG-STABLE yet, if so, we should review them to see if they're suitable 
for inclusion in the release or not, and merge those which are onto HEAD.

-keith


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