[Vtigercrm-developers] Quality and developers: help subversion helps you

[xavier dutoit]

Dear all,

I have an easy solution to help the developers and the community work
better, and produce better code: use subversion properly.

What we need is to be able to easily have our system with the latest
stable version. If a bug is fixed, we need to get it from svn. If I
submit a patch, I want to be sure it's on the latest stable version,
and I want it to be as easy as possible to create the patch (svn diff)
and for you to use it and add it back in the repository, so everyone
can get it.

So far, the way you're using svn doesn't allow that, we are supposed
to jump from one 5.0.x branch to another to be on the latest stable
version. Unfortunately, I'm not agile enough for that, and you make it
more difficult for you too (Richie submited to the 5.0.1 branch after
it's been freezed for instance).

This is what I suggest:

As you do, trunk contains the latest cutting edge kind of things.
Where you develop new features.

Then a handful of stable versions
/stable/main_version (in your case, 4.2 and 5.0)

all the bug fixes go into 5.0 until you reach the next stable version (5.1).
You don't submit bug fixes elsewhere than 5.0.

When you want to release a patch, you create a new branch from the 5.0 one:

/release/5.0.0
/release/5.0.1

and build your patch from there, as you do now.

This mean that once I've checkouted my 5.0, I know that I'm going to
get the latest corrections, but won't get the newest dev (that are in
trunk). That's exactly what I want and that will let us test the fixes
before you release a patch.

That will also let us submit a svn diff that you can directly use when
we fix a bug.

Please do so. Please let subversion help you. Please make it easy to help you.

So, what do you think about it ? On my side, I've got patches for
various small problems (eg. missing joints on some reports...), that's
I'd like to commit, provided that I have an easy way of doing it.
Moreover, I've got a bigger thing coming (dealing a little bit better
with duplicates) on the imports. The same applies...

Xavier

P.S. Yes, that's the same topic I've discussed with Philip and Richie.
Yes I know you wanted to discuss it on the list, I just tought that
the discussion about quality was the right time to bring that on the
list.