Hi,
On Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 11:29:25AM +0100, Mike Hearn wrote:
Having stable branches doesn't seem to hurt the kernel, X, gnome, kde, etc etc. Some people will use the stable branch, the rest will follow CVS and hack on that, same as always.
I think that reasoning distracts from the real issue: creating a stable and an unstable branch incurs an administrative overhead, one which might simply be too much compared to the gain we'd have without that overhead because we could concentrate on other things (things which are still not implemented, such as a very large percentage of Win32 APIs).
Linux (and all the other projects mentioned above) doesn't have such issues at all, since it sets its own pace (and thus has a well-defined current set of capabilities that are ALL implemented at any point in time), so it's well-justified to have stable/unstable there.
After all I don't think our Wine CVS is THAT broken/problematic (the test suite should help here, too! Why not improve that one for a change?), and if people want that extra bit of stability, then they're very well-advised to go with CXO (or do you want to deprive CodeWeavers of their well-earned money? ;-)).
Even just thinking of the extra 700MB compiled code on my HDD resulting from two branches worries me a bit. ;-)
Not to mention that I believe that the kernel and KDE projects have a drastically larger developer audience than Wine, so they can easily afford having some people do the branch maintenance.
So at this point in time I still think that doing stable/unstable branching would be the entirely wrong thing to do.
Andreas Mohr