[development] more work required by new release system? (was re: CVS branch work best practices?)

[Adrian Simmons]

Derek Wright wrote:

> b) you can do all your new feature development in HEAD and never have to 
> merge.  for the 4th time in 12 hours, RTFM:
> http://drupal.org/node/17570#HEAD
OK, I stand corrected, but it'd probably be clearer to long time contrib 
users if it said (in the section 'Use it for the "new feature" branch for 
the current stable core') something along the lines of:

"long term  contrib users should note that this is in effect the method 
generally used before the new release system was implemented, you don't 
*have* to change the way you work with CVS"

> do 
> whatever you want, including what you've always done.
Honestly, even reading the documentation for about the 4th time[1] it's not 
at all clear to me that you can effectively 'carry on as usual' as far as 
CVS is concerned (obviously the web side is a little different).

The documentation provides a very detailed explantion for new users, perhaps 
what's lacking is 'what's changed' guide for 'long term' contrib users?

>> tracking module updates if you're used to pulling them from cvs.
> which, in practice, is tiny.
Several hours so far in my case.

> only a small minority of modules have more 
> branches than core does.
The problem is you have no way of knowing that without surfing each project 
page and looking, and each time you do an update then it's possible the 
module maintainer will have changed their working practice. But...

> but, this is becoming less and less of an issue, thanks to nedjo, merlin 
> and myself working on the "ask drupal.org if my site is up-to-date 
> XML-RPC interface":
> http://drupal.org/node/48580
Indeed, I've installed release_monitor too. I can see that this will get 
easier, which is why I didn't really go into it in the last mail.

I'm also looking forward to your thoughts on:
http://drupal.org/node/116131
and whether it's feasible, as you work through the backlog.

 > next time you run "cvs update" in the
 > top level of your modules directory,
I stopped working like that a while back, doing cvs export on the handful of 
modules I actually use instead, so I can import into my svk repo without all 
the CVS folders. But really I should sit down and work up a script to strip 
out the CVS folders before import and just use cvs co...but I'm rambling.

>> but you're making us all work harder, not true.
I stand (largely) corrected. Apologies for such a terrible welcome back.


[1] In my defense I have to say I'm seriously sleep deprived at the moment 
due to my young children.

-- 
Adrian Simmons (aka adrinux) <http://adrinux.perlucida.com>
e-mail <mailto:adrinux at perlucida.com>