[WWdevel] Lessons learned from 2.2 freeze/release

[Sam H. <sh...@ma...>]

Hi All,

Now that 2.2.0 is out, it's a good time to think about what worked  
and what didn't in preparing for this release. Here are my thoughts:

It doesn't really matter whether we fix a bug in rel-2-2-dev and then  
forward-port it to MAIN, or vice versa. Both work equally well, as  
long as your careful.

The procedure I gave for committing a change to two different  
branches is somewhat cumbersome. I found myself instead maintaining  
two up-to-date working copies, one on rel-2-2-dev and one on MAIN,  
and doing like this:

  # make some change to my 2.2 working copy.
  cd webwork2_rel-2-2-dev
  nano Foo.pm
  nano Bar.pm
  # before committing, send that change over to my MAIN working copy.
  cvs diff Foo.pm Bar.pm | (cd ../webwork2_MAIN&&patch)
  # commit to rel-2-2-dev
  cvs commit
  # (copy the log message for use in the other commit.)
  # commit to MAIN
  cd ../webwork2_MAIN
  cvs commit

I also ended up watching the commit stream, so other developers  
didn't need to be totally disciplined about making sure bugfixes got  
into both branches. I'll still miss bugfixes that are embedded in  
larger non-backportable changes committed to MAIN, so please split up  
bugfixes and enhancements or at least mention in the commit message  
when both are in a single commit.

The rel-2-2-dev branch and the MAIN branch remained largely  
identical, indicating that no one was doing any "new" development  
during the freeze period. I still think it was good to start the -dev  
branch when we did, just in case new development is taking place in  
parallel.

Does anyone have any thoughts about the freeze/release process this  
time around? (I'll be addressing 2.3 development and 2.2 maintenance  
in a separate email.)
-sam