Re: [lwip-devel] devel vs stable cvs

[Leon Woestenberg]

Hello Jani and others,

> I wonder whether a more conventional model of CVS/release wouldn't be more
appopriate for lwip, seeing that people don't really test devel if they have
another CVS branch.
> While many people _do_ tend to keep up with CVS.
> I recall the original reason for devel was that Leon did some potentially
invasive changes so he made a separate branch for them. I still think when
something as big happens a branch is welcome to avoid unnecessary trouble
but for most work which has been goin on lately in devel and because it
happened at a slow speed - a few commits a week people could be a lot more
helpful provding feedback on regressions the moment they appear. We already
got two such regressions and devel was only recently been merged
> Also the tcp_pcb->ack list bug Karl Jeacle noticed was on devel hence it
did not bother people for months showning that CVS stable is preffered.
>

> What do you think?
>
I agree with the findings that bugs show up earlier when they are in the
main tree; my impression exactly.

How about the following model:

- Bug fixes are allowed in main.
- Invasive changes, new features and bug fixes are allowed in DEVEL.

Note that this would require bidirectional merging which is a real pain in
the *ss if you ask me! (We now do development on DEVEL only, and
merge unidirectionally back into main).

My preference would be for everyone just testing DEVEL :-)

An alternative would be increased an frequency of merging. Unidirectional
mergers can be automated by a Unix script, as long as the target (main)
is not touched inbetween. This is the case with lwIP.

> Not to mention the confusions merging, and those weird version numbers
cause in CVS.
>
1.44.2.5 means the file was branched of 1.44 in main, and is on revision 5
in the branch.
I kind of got used to the versioning scheme...

> When savannah will provide something better in this regard like subversion
or arch this will change but this is not the main point.
> I really think that dosing the changes and people catching up with them
one by one instead of all at once is going to be better.
>
If it helps improve the development of lwIP, I agree with your proposal.

I wonder what other developers think about it?

Cheers,

Leon.