{"id":363,"date":"2004-06-29T18:24:54-04:00","date_gmt":"2004-06-30T02:24:54+00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/wordpress\/?p=363"},"modified":"2004-06-29T18:24:54-04:00","modified_gmt":"2004-06-30T02:24:54+00:00","slug":"disruptive-work-on-a-stable-branch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/2004\/06\/29\/disruptive-work-on-a-stable-branch\/","title":{"rendered":"Disruptive work on a stable branch"},"content":{"rendered":"

I sat down to write a screed on the wonky Aviary branch<\/cite> happening at mozilla.org<\/a>, but I’m a little under the weather and thoughts aren’t flowing as clearly as I’d like. I might come back to this later, but thought I’d post what I have just so it’s out there.<\/p>\n\n

\n\n

In Real Life<\/a> I do quality assurance, including being the de facto<\/span> source control guru. As part of this I help to manage change in our source tree; in large part I try to stick to the best practices<\/a> put forth by Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald at Perforce Software, because for the most part they’re simply formalizing common sense.<\/p>\n\n

The Aviary branch<\/cite> of the Mozilla browser and mail programs was created to be used for stable branch builds of these apps from now until the 1.0 releases of these apps<\/q><\/a>. The Mozillazine FAQ<\/a> says that the trunk is for Continued Mozilla backend development<\/q>. Unfortunately, the brunk<\/a> policy (if there is one) is that development can take place willy-nilly without being propagated back to the main codebase. Logic, and the rationale behind the branch in the first place, would suggest that disruptive changes–new features<\/a>, modifications affecting interoperability<\/a>, and other substantial alterations<\/a>–be created off to the side and then merged into the so-called stable<\/em> branch when they are–wait for it–stable<\/em>. Stable changes in the branch should be merged back to the trunk sooner rather than later [because] postponed and batched change propagations can result in stunningly complex file merges.<\/q><\/p><\/div>

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