[Zope3-dev] Re: Zope 3.2 maintenance

[Dieter Maurer]

Hanno Schlichting wrote at 2006-9-11 23:06 +0200:
> ...
>You got it backwards ;) I only forward-port any changes from older
>branches to the more recent ones, but never do any backports. The reason
>I do this is because before this, Plone developers tended to only fix a
>bug on the trunk or the latest stable release. My hope was that by
>lowering the bar by only requiring developers to fix a bug on the oldest
>maintained release branch, more people would actually do this and in
>fact I think this strategy has worked out. This works in conjunction
>with our quite well-maintained bug-tracker where bugs get assigned to
>the release they should be fixed in by a small group of people.

A very good approach!

  Because all modifications done on released branch should be
  fixes only, we want almost all of them in the trunk as well.

  And there is a good chance that there will only be
  few merge conflicts.

  Unfortunately, I could not convince my colleagues to work
  this way -- despite a good practical experience.

  One argument has been: the Zope development does not use it...

>But two things to keep in mind that differentiate Plone from Zope3 in
>this regard are, that most of the fixes in Plone are template issues or
>minimal changes that apply cleanly on the newer branches and when they
>don't or I do not understand them I ask the bug fixer to forward port
>it.

You can of course do this always.

> ...
>For Zope3 the only sensible option IMO is, as others already mentioned
>it, to have a fix-on-the-oldest-maintained-branch-first bug fixing
>policy which requires to forward port these fixes to all branches up to
>the trunk.

Why are you that pessimistic about Zope3 -- once the moving around
has stopped (which might be a challenge for automatic forward merging)?



-- 
Dieter