Next focus: PROCESS

[deadalnix]

On Sunday, 16 December 2012 at 08:30:04 UTC, Rob T wrote:
> On Sunday, 16 December 2012 at 07:35:27 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
>>
>> The only goal that is coming is trying to reach some level of 
>> stability. Everything else is completely different.
>>
>
> There are still some clear similarities between what Debian is 
> doing and what I presume most people do in software development.
>
> For the software I develop we have what is called a "live" 
> branch, which is the code that is in active use by our 
> customers. This branch corresponds to the stable branch we're 
> trying to achieve, and it only gets critical bug fixes until 
> the next major update which includes new features and/or major 
> adjustments as well as non-critical bug fixes. We also have a 
> testing branch, which includes the latest pre-release code for 
> the next major update. This code is running on a VM and is 
> tested by our customers (and the developers), under conditions 
> similar to "live". There's also a common "dev" branch for the 
> code which is in development but not yet ready for testing. 
> This branch corresponds to the Dev (Master) Branch, The master 
> branch gets updated from individual forks owned by each 
> developer. Coordination among developers is essential to 
> prevent duplications and major conflicts.
>
> So in essence we're following a similar model to the Debian 
> model of (Master Dev) which is "unstable " => Pre-release 
> Testing => Stable.
>
> It works great, and I see no way to remove any of the branches 
> without seriously compromising the end result.
>
> For example, we can't go directly from Dev to Stable, that 
> would be like committing suicide. We can't use testing for dev 
> updates, it's too destabilizing and we'd never get a properly 
> tested stable release out unless all development updates were 
> halted for a long period of time, but then the individual forks 
> would pile up with major changes that would be very difficult 
> to sort out when merged all back together.
>
> We need 3 common branches, and I just don't see a way out of 
> that.
>
> BTW, I'm using Mercurial which has many similarities to Git. 
> Unfortunately I don't know my way around Git very well at this 
> time.
>

So distro's versioning system is good for a programming language 
because you use it successfully in your software which isn't a 
programming language (and we also don't know according to which 
goal it is successful) ?

By the way, debian testing is not what you think it is : 
http://www.debian.org/devel/testing.en.html