[development] CVS branch work best practices?

[AjK]

Dries wrote:
> That's correct.  You need to apply these patches in both branches.
>
> If you don't want that you can follow core's release cycle.  In that
> case, you develop in the HEAD branch and target D6, and use the
> DRUPAL-5 for bugfixes only.

Almost, it depends on the mindset. I just spoke with Ber (and others) in
#drupal-support and it seems to have cleared a few things up. Here's a
summary.

First, contrib devel is not core devel. Core devel happens at HEAD as we all
know. But contrib need not. Basically, if you reserve your contrib HEAD for
Code Freeze then you need do no work in it at all. In fact, I'm deleting my
contrib HEAD files and leaving a README.txt that just says "Please use a
stable release from the DRUPAL-x branch".

Then, devel and bug fix work continues in the latest branch (and bug fixes
only in the previous branch, 4.7 as of now).

When Code Freeze time comes, that's the time Contrib HEADs should "light up"
with activity. At that point, for example at D6 Cfreeze, copy the latest
version out of the DRUPAL-5 branch into HEAD and begin the update process.
DRUPAL-5 branch is now the bug fix only branch.

It's more of a "mindset" and "policy" of how you work as a contrib
maintainer. As said, contrib isn't core, it trails core and so should it's
HEAD. imho anyway.

Some people may prefer to track Core HEAD to save themselves a lot of update
work. That's fine, that's just the mindset and policy they have chosen to
carry out their work. It boils down to what you are comfortable with and
what makes sense.

--Andy (AjK)