[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Documentation, Usability and Development

[Petr Baudis <pasky@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > That's why the development branch needs to be an official branch of
> > the main project, and *anything* that isn't strictly a bugfix needs to
> > go there first.  There has to be significant motivation on the part of
> > everyone involved to move stuff from the development branch into the
> > stable branch.  Otherwise most new features will never be seen by the
> 
> This just makes a mess of things IMHO. That ball of mess you call
> "development branch" with N generations of patches... after a couple of
> months do you still remember which patch changed which part? Can you
> easily pull things apart?
You have CVS. That is exactly what it was meant for. Revisions, hmm? I was
able to hunt one little change in AI code in 15 minutes using cvs diff and
cvs log, lagged as hell.

> > general userbase (who tend to use only the stable versions).  That's
> > why it makes the most sense to periodically do a feature freeze of the
> > development branch, get most of the bugs worked out of it, then switch
> 
> Agreed, we should release more often. But IMHO having 2 branches wouldn't
> help that. It would make matters even worse because it would further
> dilute resources.
It seems I agree here. We need to release much more often, don't apply patches
in bunches but as they comes, and most releases mark as unstable, and only
known working ones (feature freeze once by the time is a good idea) mark
as stable. No need for two branches, IMHO.

> > it over to the stable branch, and start a new development branch at
> > that point.  This is the method that has been proven to work with
> > Linux.  Why aren't we using it?  I mean, the only extra work involved
Because we are still not so complex as Linux. Development branch is mostly
for major redesigns etc, and this we don't need yet, as if we will do a
redesign, it will be probably step by step and it is still easy to do it
completely between two development releases (obviously after lloonngg
discussion ;-).
> 
> Ah yes. Linux...
Have you read bazaar vs cathedral, which _should_ be freeciv inspired in?
I think we should follow that mainly. It was written partly as description
of linux early development policy (by analogy).

..flamebait follows..
> Your role model "Linux" takes way too long between releases. The Linux
> method is far from perfect. Besides taking too long, and being focused on
> one single person (single point of failure), they add features often without
> considering the consequences. ..snip..
>
> Your role model doesn't even use CVS, or in fact any version control
> system... Nothing is perfect.
He just have proposed to use development branch as Linux does, NOT to act
as Linux in everything.

-- 

                                Petr "Pasky" Baudis

UN*X programmer, UN*X administrator, hobbies = IPv6, IRC
Real Users hate Real Programmers.
Public PGP key, geekcode and stuff: http://pasky.ji.cz/~pasky/