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[Pupeno]

On Wednesday 19 July 2006 03:08, Chris Double wrote:
> WIth darcs projects I'm involved with I've found having a 'stable' and
> 'unstable' repository to make things much easier.

I think it is better not to have a stable repository but a set of stable 
repositories like I described here: 
http://pupeno.com/blog/software-release-cycle
That is, you have repository "slate" with unstable code always going to the 
future. On a release, you make a tag on "slate" called 0.1, branch it 
into "slate-0.1" and make the tag 0.1.0, tar it up and release 0.1.0. "slate" 
starts to work towards 0.2.0 and "slate-0.1" towards 0.1.1. When 0.1.1 
arrives, you tag 0.1.1, tar it up and release it. Eventually you'll reach 0.2 
on the "slate" branch and you repeat: tag "0.2", branch to "slate-0.2", 
tag "0.2.0", tar it, release 0.2.0.
That allows people to go to the bleeding edge, slate, or some 
branch, "slate-X.Y" which just gets more stable as time goes on.
Now, in this cycle it is ok to only have one branch, like other 
suggested, "slate", as long as you want until you release something. About 
making tags of particularly stable points for people to play with without 
using darcs, the answer is, they are snapshots. You can create tags 
like "snapshot-N" were N is a number that you increment and that's it.

The reason why I think that a stable and unstable branches are not really nice 
is because you'll eventually merge a lot of things from the unstable branch 
into the stable. That would bake stable less stable (favoring features over 
stability), you'll get users pissed up because upgrading/updating the stable 
branch wasn't supposed to break anything and suddenly it broke everything. 
Stable branches should only get closer to perfect stability (ok, a bug fix 
can insert another bug, that's just an accident, it should be fixed and 
that's it) while the unstable branches goes up and down in the roller coaster 
of instability.

My two cents.
-- 
Pupeno <pupeno at pupeno.com> (http://pupeno.com)

PS: whatever you do, please, oh! please, don't use Linux (and Gnome) 
versioning of having the odd versions unstable and the even versions stable. 
I believe it makes no sense (unless you refuse to use a versioning system 
because it doesn't have all the features you want favoring a madness of 
patches, like Linus Torvalds used to do).
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