branches contra tags for releases.

Dirk Hohndel dirk at hohndel.org
Fri Jun 29 13:31:41 PDT 2018


On Fri, Jun 29, 2018 at 09:57:10PM +0200, Jan Iversen wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Is there a reason why we use tags instead of branches for a release. I am used to having a release branch for 2 reasons:
> - work on master is not blocked but continues normally (with cherry pick to the release branch)
> - it is easy to make a release patch if needed.

There are different philosophies on how to manage a git repo. We tried
release branches and it was generally not worth the hassle. We typically
slow down master for just a few days (because we have no serious release
process, let's be honest about it), so the inconvenience for the
developers really isn't that big. And it removes the issue of ending up
with patches going to multiple branches. We don't have the scale and the
resources to really deal with providing updates to older releases, anyway.

When we did the Gtk->Qt transition this made sense. We've done it in other
circumstances where massive changes made master a bit unstable (or lost us
features) and therefore it was reasonable to have a stable branch off of a
release. But in general... I don't see a ton of value.

/D


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