Proposal that we now create two branches - 2_5 and head

[Green, Paul]

jw schultz [mailto:jw at pegasys.ws] wrote:

[general discussion of forthcoming patches removed]

> All well and good.  But the question before this thread is
> are the changes big and disruptive enough to make a second
> branch for the event of a security or other critical bug.

Agreed.

> Personally i doubt that such a bug is that likely to emerge
> and that if it does we can always create a branch off of
> the 2.5.6 tag at that time.

Quite true.  But I'd like to make the point that I think it is worth making
the decision to split now.  Having two branches will change attitudes.  And
I think with as large a community of users as rsync clearly has, it is worth
changing attitudes.  Having a production branch will remind us that we have
a place to put stability or security fixes, and will make it easy to do so.
Perhaps too easy; time will tell.  I'm concerned that if we wait until we
clearly need a production branch, we'll probably have already forgotten to
apply some fixes that should have also gone in, and then we'll be busy
trying to grab them out of the cvs repository.

I think if you look at this from a developer or maintainers point of view,
having an extra branch is a pain.  A minor pain to be sure, but still a
pain.  But if you look at it from a user's point of view, it is a very good
thing...

> Related to this is that we should make an effort to
> incorporate just one of these larger changes at a time
> please.   If we have to increment the protocol version
> number by two or three going from 2.5.6 to 2.5.7 that is OK
> by me.

Agreed.  Tho once we start fixing bugs in the new features things will get
confusing again.

> I am inclined to prioritize the checksum fixes.  They are
> central to rsync and i'd like them to get a maximum of
> testing as early in the new cycle as possible.  This is the
> one scaling deficiency we have a decent chance of fixing.

Agreed, except ... do we have any control over the order in which our
volunteers submit their changes?  Doubtful...

Thanks
PG