Re: bzr stable branch maintenance and backporting

On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 22:26 -0400, Tres Seaver wrote:
>
> OK. I had the impression that bzr's model was "branch
> happy" (compared
> to CVS / SVN), which would seem to me to make "forward porting" more
> attractive.

bzr encourages many, lightweight branches.

> For instance, in supportig Zope2, we often need to do a fix across
> multiple supported releases: e.g., if somebody reported a security
> issue today, we might end up releasing fixes for Zope 2.8 and 2.9, as
> well as 2.10 (the currently released branch) and 2.11 (the
> almost-ready-for-prime-time branch). I've even done one fix in this
> configuration for 2.7 (because there are a large number of production
> systems on 2.7, including a couple of my clients).

Yup.

> My experience with such fixes indicates that it is much easier to fix
> the oldest stuff, and than forward port, compared to fixing the trunk,
> and then backporting. That made the "daggy fixes" model seem quite
> natural to me.

My point is that you can do it in any direction you find most
convenient. Once any two branches are diverged, there is no difference
for a vcs - theres no 'forward' or 'backword' to the merge - its
symmetrical.

-Rob

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