[OE-core] Branch management for OE-Core release

[Chris Larson]

On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 5:47 AM, Richard Purdie
<richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-09-26 at 09:27 -0300, Otavio Salvador wrote:
>> On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 06:23, Richard Purdie
>> <richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>> ...
>> > FWIW, something like git cherry can identify your local changes so you
>> > could apply them on top of master so there are other ways to make your
>> > usecase work...
>>
>> This breaks the value of using a SCM since you won't have a common parent.
>>
>> As Chris, I'd prefer to have it merged.
>>
>> The only way it can complicate issue is if fixes are cherry-picked
>> into the stable branch. If they're are done into the stable and merged
>> into master this works wonderfully.
>
> No, this just just plain wrong. Changes go into master which is where
> development happens. They can then filter into other branches (there may
> be more than one) as needed.

Agreed. No unique changes should generally go into a release or stable
branch first. Master is where future development happens by
definition. The only time a bugfix should go into the stable/release
branch directly is if master has deviated sufficiently such that
fixing it there + cherry picking no longer makes sense.

I do still think there's a certain amount of value in a periodic merge
back, however. Primarily because this encodes knowledge into the
repository about the fact that yes, every single fix in the
release/stable branch is in fact also in master. Someone looking at
the repository, lacking knowledge about our particular branching
policies, will be able to see this by use of rev-list/log.

Just the other day I was doing a conversion from svn to git for a
project and ran into a related issue. There was no merge metadata in
svn from the release branches back to master, so now I have to
painstakingly step through and make absolutely certain all the fixes
went into both. For old releases, this is particularly difficult (and
I think is part of otavio's concern), as you can no longer just merge
from release/stable to master sanely, due to refactoring, renames, etc
on the master branch.
-- 
Christopher Larson
clarson at kergoth dot com
Founder - BitBake, OpenEmbedded, OpenZaurus
Maintainer - Tslib
Senior Software Engineer, Mentor Graphics