Why to have an alpha branch?

[Paul Dufresne]

I hope you don't mind too much I put your message on the list
without asking you first, but that's a very good occasion to tell
everybody, that I did not receive any answer on my previous email
to the list asking that we stop using a completely separated alpha
branch, but rather that we begin to tag much, much more often.
I have the feeling that part of the reluctance to this idea is that
maybe (I'm not sure it is the case) CVS completely duplicate the
repository for each tag. My understanding of darcs is that it just
add some kind of empty patch (but with full context) for each tag.
Which seems to take very few place.

So basically what I was suggesting was to use a version number (maybe
just
one number). When main seems stable, we would tag it with the next
number,
but prefixed with an 'A' for Alpha. And, possibly, milestone versions
with an 'M'.

I still suggest to put generated files (VM and images),
in a separete repository, that would use the same versions numbers as
the
other, but would contain only files for 'A'lpha tags and 'M'ilestones.

Now on the current situation, I begin to realize that you apply all
patches to
main, then alpha (later if they can be problematic). I was thinking that
there
was some (semi-automatic) script going on, that was just erasing alpha
and
replacing the files by main. But your reply make me suspect it is not
the case.

That said, I did stop very recently to test my patches against alpha
recently.
I think because I would had to give a different patch for alpha than for
main.
Probably what make me suggest to have just one repository, but use tags.
But I will get alpha back, and test my patch against it again. But this
is
not the long term way I hope to have.

On Fri, 1 Apr 2005 14:10:16 -0800, "Brian Rice" <water at tunes.org> said:
> I've applied it and pushed it into main, but not alpha, because darcs 
> reported a bug when applying it (but darcs check and re-calling darcs 
> apply didn't indicate anything wrong). Please be sure to check against 
> it and let me know if you need to further patch or whatever.
> 
> On Apr 1, 2005, at 11:32 AM, Paul Dufresne wrote:
> 
> > Now it only draws when mouse button is pressed.
> >
> > Made change to use caseOf: .
> >
> > <DrawOnlyOnMouseDown>
> --
> Brian T. Rice
> LOGOS Research and Development
> http://tunes.org/~water/
>