[Zope-Coders] branch madness

[Brian Lloyd]

> > >So now we've got 2-4-2b1, I'm confused all over again about branches
> > >off branches.  Could someone patiently unwind it all for me?
> 
> <snip explanation>
> 
> OK, to summarise: the only branch most developers ever need to
> worry about is the current minor release branch, viz. 2.4 currently. 

Right.

 
> I've done a very small fix in a branch off 2.4.2.  (it didn't
> necessarily warrant a branch, but I'm being ultra-cautious right
> now).  I take it I can just go ahead and merge that straight into 2.4? 
> (N.B. Brian: the fix is to bullets in STX-NG - it was outputting
> <p> tags which serve no apparent purpose, and in this way differs in
> behaviour from Classic - is this OK?)

Note - if you really made your branch off of *2.4.2* (rather than 
Zope-2_4-branch), then you need to be careful. Your fix should go 
into two places: the mainline and Zope-2_4-branch. It should *not* 
go into the 2.4.2 branch - it is frozen, period, except for 
emergency fixes by the release monkeys (myself and Matt K.), as of 
last friday when the beta was made.


> One thing which is still not clear: Matthew and Brian seem to be
> saying different things about whether a bug-fix release should usually
> be a branch or a tag.

It essentially doesn't matter - a branch is really just another tag
if you never make changes to it. Our goal (mark a "frozen" version of 
the sources at final beta that we can make the final release from, so 
that we don't have to stop people from working) could be achieved by 
just tagging or by making a branch. Matt happened to choose to make a 
branch. Which way we do it has no impact on other developers - they 
should never committing changes on anything other than 
the current release branch, the mainline, or private branches.


Brian Lloyd        brian@zope.com
Software Engineer  540.361.1716       
Zope Corporation   http://www.zope.com