AA literals/initialisation

[Brad Anderson]

On Sunday, 12 January 2014 at 16:48:08 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
> On 1/12/14 3:02 AM, Daniel Murphy wrote:
>> "Manu" <turkeyman at gmail.com> wrote in message
>> news:mailman.334.1389499497.15871.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
>>> I've just run into this again today. It's still very annoying.
>>> Consider this a reminder? :)
>>
>> AAs should be rolled back first, and these have been sitting 
>> there for a
>> couple of months.
>>
>> https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/2856
>> https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/druntime/pull/668
>>
>> Walter has decided that this coming release will only be 
>> bugfixes...
>> kind of a useless thing to do for an open source project, as 
>> him
>> refusing to review/merge my enhancement pulls doesn’t inspire 
>> me to work
>> on ‘actual bugs’.
>
> If we're refraining from or delaying pulling contributions for 
> undue reasons we're doing something wrong.
>
> Andrei

The Release Process on the wiki[1] does not have a method for a
bugfix only release so it's definitely a problem. Both bugfixes
and features get merged into master.

The release process forbids cherry-picking between branches (some
rationale for this rule would be nice; it feels like a mistake to
me) so that can't be used to solve the problem. I don't think
there is a way to do a bugfix only release without cherry-picking.

If it were me, I'd just would have had both bugfixes and features
merge into master as described by the release process and have a
2.065 branch which a single person is responsible for
cherry-picking bugfixes into (alternatively you could have
whoever merges the bugfix into master do it).

Frankly, I think the described Release Process is much more
complicated than it needs to be. Fundamentally you only need two
branches at any given time: master and a release branch which
only exists after the feature freeze takes place for an upcoming
release (post-release the branch gets tagged, merged back into
master[2], and deleted).

It's a shame Github doesn't let you target multiple branches with
a pull request. That'd be a nice workflow during the short lived
feature freeze window.

1. http://wiki.dlang.org/Release_Process
2. Which, I found out by chance, never happens:
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/3080 This is
very bad as commits can easily get lost though I question whether
the release branch should ever be committed to directly.