1.0.2

Discussion of general topics about Seamonkey
ksheka
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Re: I ain't Asa, but...

Post by ksheka »

Kommet wrote:[...]
We have 4 codebases now, the 1.0.x branch, the 1.1.x branch, the brand new 1.2.x branch (which has no releases yet), and the trunk which currently contains what will become 1.3. Spam Filtering is added in the early hours of pre-1.3a work and is hailed as god-like code. We decide it needs to be added to 1.0.2 and 1.1.1 and 1.2.1 (so not to hold 1.2.0 up), so we create 4 separate patches, all of which need to be debugged separately because the codebases are separate.


1.1 is a long-lived branch??? I thought that 1.0 was long-lived and that the 1.x (x > 0) branches were just milestones that aren't really made for developers. The reason I'm asking is, if all the 1.x branches are long-lived, pretty soon it'll get difficult for the maintainers to maintain all the branches with current security fixes, etc.
asa
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Re: I ain't Asa, but...

Post by asa »

ksheka wrote:
Kommet wrote:[...]
We have 4 codebases now, the 1.0.x branch, the 1.1.x branch, the brand new 1.2.x branch (which has no releases yet), and the trunk which currently contains what will become 1.3. Spam Filtering is added in the early hours of pre-1.3a work and is hailed as god-like code. We decide it needs to be added to 1.0.2 and 1.1.1 and 1.2.1 (so not to hold 1.2.0 up), so we create 4 separate patches, all of which need to be debugged separately because the codebases are separate.

1.1 is a long-lived branch???

1.1 isn't being actively developed. There weren't any contributors interested in doing anything more with 1.1 so there was no value to be had by creating a shared development branch. 1.2 may have some continued development after the Milestone is released if there are interested contributors and there is value to be had by sharing a public development branch among them.
ksheka wrote:I thought that 1.0 was long-lived and that the 1.x (x > 0) branches were just milestones that aren't really made for developers.

1.0 is a long-lived (a year or so) branch supported with occasional releases from mozilla.org. That doesn't preclude other branches from living on beyond the mozilla.org Milestone release. Hopefully additional branches wouldn't live for nearly as long as the 1.0 branch but I see no problem in providing a public shared development branch for folks that would like to ship products from something newer than 1.0.x. Every milestone is made for developers. I hope that scores, no, hundreds of developers from dozens of organizations decend on the 1.2 branch and collaborate there to build a myriad of wonderful Mozilla-based applications. If that doesn't happen then I'll encourage them to use 1.3 when it's available and then 1.4 and so on.
ksheka wrote:The reason I'm asking is, if all the 1.x branches are long-lived, pretty soon it'll get difficult for the maintainers to maintain all the branches with current security fixes, etc.

mozilla.org doesn't have the resources to produce multiple releases for every branch in cvs.mozilla.org. That doesn't preclude developers using those branches to coordinate releases of mozilla-based products. For example, I think that there were some security fixes ported back to the old 0.9.4 branch because there were several mozilla-based products that shipped off of that branch which could all use that fix. mozilla.org didn't do a binary release of 0.9.4.2 or 0.9.4.3 release from that branch but other organizations did do releases with those fixes. If several organizations come to me and say they'd like to build products from the 1.2 branch then I'm going to see if I can help them coordinate publically for the better of all interested in releasing from that point. Does that mean that mozilla.org has to also do further releases from that branch? No.

--Asa
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alanjstr
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Post by alanjstr »

Whew, Asa, I'd say your responses in here qualify for an FAQ entry or 3. This was a great explanation about the differences and how/why branches continue. Maybe this should be sticky so that more people read it.
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