From: Gary B. <bur...@ya...> - 2008-04-25 15:18:57
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Gerald >1: I'm confused by the terms "trunk" and "branch." I know what they >mean for a tree, but not for a program! Can someone please explain? The tree analogy is a good one. The trunk version of gramps is where the bleeding edge development takes place. This means that trunk is sometimes unstable, crashes & eats your data. If you are a Debian user then trunk is like Sid. As development progresses, trunk will reach a point where is contains all the features that are intended for the next release. At this point a new branch will be created - the branch is initially just a copy of trunk. So a while ago the gramps30 branch was created from trunk when it contained all the features we wanted for the 3.0 release. After a branch is created, developers will normally carry on bug fixing and stabilising the branch to get it ready for release but won't add new features to it. Bug fixes discovered in the branch will be applied to both the branch and trunk. Any development on brand new features that will form part of the next big release will continue in trunk alone. When a branch has stabilised enough that it's ready to release, the release manager will "tag" the branch. Tagging marks all of the source code revisions in a branch that we want to form part of an actual release. So the gramps30 branch was tagged for the gramps 3.0.0 release. After release, bug fixing work still continues as real users get their hands on the release and find the more obscure problems that did not show prior to release. Fixes are developed for these and added to the branch and trunk. After a certain amount of time or after a major bug has been discovered it's time to make another release from the branch. Some point soon we will be ready to do this from the gramps30 branch, which will be tagged again and released as gramps 3.0.1. The gramps30 branch will continue to be bug fixed until the next major release has been branched and released when focus will move to the next branch. So, any if you have changes to make at the moment you need to decide if it's a bug fix or new functionality. If it's a bug fix then it should be applied to both gramps30 and trunk. If it is a new feature then it should go into trunk and will be released as part of gramps 3.1 (or 3.2 depending on how we are going to do version numbering in the future). Hope this helps Gary __________________________________________________________ Sent from Yahoo! Mail. A Smarter Email http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html |