[MOAB-dev] Backporting to version 4.5

[James Porter]

On Fri, 2012-04-06 at 11:07 -0500, Jed Brown wrote:
> +1 for switching to git or hg, but you still put those patches in the
> release, then (as often as you like) merge from release to trunk. Tags
> are on a specific SHA1 so they never move (but you don't want them
> to).

Generally, I go the other way (fix everything on trunk, backport
selectively to release branches), but that assumes you have a dedicated
group of people running trunk builds.

I think for us, the strategy we take should depend on how many people
use trunk versus how many people use the latest revision of a release
branch. I'd guess we have more of the former, so fixing things on trunk
first would probably get wider testing.

Of course, this does make the merging process more complicated, since
you'd have to cherrypick changesets to backport. On the other hand, if
we make sure that patches are in both branches at all times (good for
testing), the exact order of commits wouldn't really matter, since you'd
only be merging a single changeset at a time.

- Jim