[mythtv] Simple traffic-light system to indicate stablity of trunk?

Nick Morrott knowledgejunkie at gmail.com
Mon Jun 23 21:01:24 UTC 2008


On 23/06/2008, buzz <davidbuzz at gmail.com> wrote:

>  Of course, other's opinions may vary, so it might be better for you to
>  just subscribe to -commits and -dev, and decide for yourself.   If
>  that's too hard for you, then consider all -fixes releases to be
>  green, all SVN releases to be RED (ie steer clear), and you'll be OK.

Agreed. If you're not reading -dev and -commits (and prepared for the
increased work that entails), trunk isn't for you. If you are reading
those lists, you'll likely notice traffic indicating the stability of
trunk, and may even see requests for testers as a release looms.

There's also the issue of who is responsible for making the judgment
call - there aren't enough dev-hours as it is, so more admin work
providing little if any gain over the status quo is probably not going
to be popular (I might be wrong though :) ). Trunk moves pretty fast
(stop and look around, you might miss it...) which means a single
commit could potentially break it before the lights change colour.

Remember that 'trying' trunk before reverting back to a -fixes branch
may require extra work in terms of reverting your database, if trunk
has added new features that -fixes lacks. New features are almost
always only committed to trunk, the -fixes branch only gets bug fixes
or 'special' new features, such as support for Schedules Direct. It's
a difficult call to make - I've found that reading the -dev and
-commits list gives enough indication of what to expect if you
checkout trunk - since the QT4 work started, I'm back on 0.21-fixes.

If you want some assurance of a stable MythTV system, check out the
latest -fixes branch (those are what you'll find in a repo's stable
branch after all).

Nick

-- 
Nick Morrott

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