[darcs-users] On Release Management

Petr Rockai me at mornfall.net
Fri Nov 12 07:56:01 UTC 2010


Re,

Reinier Lamers <tux_rocker at reinier.de> writes:
> I have to say that I find this release process without branching
> beautiful. It could be frustrating however if the release process gets
> delayed nevertheless and there's no place to work on new features, not
> even if you aren't involved in solving the release problems.

IIRC I started release branches -- it had basically two purposes. First,
I could pick what goes into release and what does not, after the freeze
point, without imposing that every change to HEAD is reviewed by the
RM. Which would be tedious at best. Another is that I needed to do some
packaging and such changes that I didn't want to wait for review -- I
would do them on the release branch myself in the RM capacity.

I believe under this scheme of things, the RM needs to be able and
willing to fix RC bugs himself. It is of course the most frustrating
part of being the RM: you need to get out the release and most of the
team is not extremely interested in fixing those blockers for you. It
would probably help a lot if the managerial (the release process) and
the technical (fixing RC bugs) aspects of being an RM could be separated
into two roles. But I am not sure that's possible. Maybe now that we
actually have co-RMs, they could try out something like that, dunno.

Yours,
   Petr.


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