Hey Eric,
You don't have to release a stable version often, although it is a nice thing to do.
Normally to get to stable you'll freeze new features and have a specified amount of time to squash bugs.
Once the bugs in the tracker are worked out you create a stable release.
If a critical bug is found, you fix it in the stable branch and move the tag.
Matt
Eric Stadtherr wrote:
Matt,
That's an excellent idea in principle; however, the challenge is coming up with the process to decide what's stable. How bad does a bug have to be to prevent a revision from getting tagged? Who does the evaluation? Who "moves" the tag?
Automated unit tests with some scripts that manipulate the repository are usually the answer to this, but the maintenance of unit tests is usually a non-trivial effort.
The easiest thing to do is just keep a working copy of your own, and make your own decisions as to whether something is stable enough for your environment.
Matt Kaatman wrote:
Couldn't you have a tag called stable and move that tag with each stable release so that someone who checks it out will always be able to get the latest release tagged as stable without picking a specific version?
(So you'd probably double tag with each stable release. One tag with the version number that is constant and one that is called stable which moves with each stable release.)
Eric Stadtherr wrote:
Jason,
In general, branches aren't intended for "stable" snapshots - they exist as ongoing work areas to manage some parallel development that needs configuration control but cannot impact the baseline. Branches are usually merged back into the baseline when the parallel development is complete. In Subversion, the convention is to create "tags" for snapshots of revisions that have some meaning. If you look in the RoundCube /tags directory, you'll see the latest revision that was considered "stable," i.e. the v0.1-beta2 version.
Jason wrote:
I was checking out svn.roundcube.net and it looks like there isn't a branch that I can checkout/update that'll always give me the latest stable release. Am I missing something, or could a /branches/stable be created that was always the latest stable released version?
Thanks, Jason