[LLVMdev] 1 Week Before 2.0 Branch Creation

[Aaron Gray]

> 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?

It would be good to have a mailing list for test results where 'make check' 
results could be posted so that there is some reference and people could 
avoid repeating builds.

Aaron