[LLVMdev] 1 Week Before 2.0 Branch Creation

[David Greene]

Tanya M. Lattner wrote:

> How large of a change have you made? With 3 days before the branch 
> creation, I strongly advise people not to be checking in major changes.

Depends how you look at it.  Structurally, it separates two files into
four and moves some functionality from one class to a new class, so in a
sense that's a big change.  Code-logic-wise, it does nothing at all.  I
will send the patch to the commits list today.  Hopefully someone can
look at it and decide whether to apply it.

 > We may need to change our proceedures for releases in the future.
 > This is how we have done it in the past with no problem, but LLVM is
 > growing much more rapidly now.

In my experience, a code freeze lasts for a fair amount of time (on the
order of months).  The way I've seen it done in many projects is that
there's a deadline to get all new feature work in (with more than a
week's notice!).  Then the new branch is created.  The next two or three
months, only bugfixes are allowed on the release branch.  Some projects
close the development branch to force bugs to be fixed first, while
others run two branches in parallel.  I would lean toward the latter and
trust people to be responsible enough to fix bugs before release.

The release is done when there are no new regressions and all tests
created for new features pass.  Of course, this means that folks
should be creating tests for their features.

Do we want some kind of discussion about what this process should be
followed by a formal proposal drafted by a few people for comment and
possible adoption?

                                 -Dave