[mythtv] "stable" tag proposal

Eggert Thorlacius eggi-spam at menandmice.com
Mon Mar 21 22:12:57 UTC 2005


After reading the "should mythtv be forked?" thread I would like to 
make a simple suggestion that IMHO would solve most of the [perceived] 
problems with the stability of the CVS version of mythtv: A "stable" 
tag could be added to the mythtv CVS tree and every monday morning a 
cronjob would synchronize it with the HEAD revision.  The developers 
and crazy people like me would keep using the HEAD revision, but normal 
people, who need to update to CVS because they want a new feature, 
would be advised to use the stable tag.

This would a the following benefits:
* Developers would have a certain grace period to fix silly mistakes 
(like forgetting to check in a header file) without the inevitable "CVS 
is broken" posting to the users list
* Whenever a developer wants to commit unstable code (f.ex. the MySQL 
connection pooling code), he could submit it on a tuesday and be 
finished by the time the stable tag gets applied
* When a major update is being worked on, Isaac (or whoever owns the 
cronjob) could temporarily hold the stable tag back until everyone 
working on the upgrade is satisfied that the new code is stable.
* Those that offer RPM packages of CVS snapshots could switch to the 
stable tag and only update their packages once a week.
* Minimum overhead.  Just add a "cvs tag" command to a crontab and 
forget about it.

The biggest benefit (IMHO) would be psychological.  Many other projects 
offer stable and bleeding branches, and just because the developers 
work hard to keep the CVS version stable, people would feel better 
knowing that they are given a choice.

Regards,
Eggert



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