On Sun, 11 Jul 2004, Charles Goodwin wrote:
On Sun, 2004-07-11 at 10:43 -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
As mentioned in the freeze process proposal for this release, we will have a new 'Hard Freeze' step to give us better quality control for the run-up to the Release Phase.
During the Hard Freeze, we all refrain from committing to CVS. Instead, necessary changes should be posted to the patch tracker. A couple people -- the "Change Control Team" -- have the responsibility to vet and apply patches if they're absolutely necessary.
Why not use branches so people can continue committing whilst you have a temporary release branch to which you apply the freeze? That is what branches are for - having different versions of a codebase for varying purposes (in this case continued development vs. frozen code).
Actually, yes we will be creating a release branch as part of the release cycle, once the Hard Freeze has been completed.
For the question of why make the branch at the end rather than the beginning of the Hard Freeze, recall what happened last time, that caused us to have to do a 0.38.1 release. There was a problem with the release branch because of a bug fix that had *just* been checked in, so we needed a fix that was done in the main branch, but new development had also started in the main branch; luckily there were no major problems, but we had to scramble a bit to get everything together. After that, we decided we needed a more orderly and strict process.
Thus, by keeping the _main_ branch in a hard freeze state for a few days, such issues should settle out quickly. We can just do a final check that all the bug fixes were done right, and that no new bugs slipped in. Hopefully it should not require more than 2-3 days max.
Finally, note that this does not need to prevent people from continuing development, so long as they do it on branches. This way, during the release phase, if we needed to pull in someone's work to fix an issue, we could select just that particular branch to include. If all work was being done directly on the main line, it would be difficult to separate out the necessary fixes from other new stuff, as happened last time.
Bryce