unfrozen repo somewhere?

[Tom Lane]

"Horst H. von Brand" <vonbrand at inf.utfsm.cl> writes:
> Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
>> Decouple "product development" (here: FC<N+1>) development from bleeding
>> edge "unstable/experimental" "head development" (here: rawhide).

> Needs more hands. Starves the "product development" of developers and
> testers. Was the idea in Linux before 2.6, was abandoned for exactly the
> above reasons.

Yeah ... when it's time to ship a release, you need a forcing function
to encourage people to test-and-fix-bugs, rather than develop-cool-new-
features.  Branching early encourages people to ignore the release and
do the latter.

The Postgres project has generally avoided early branching, and I think
that policy has been a significant contributor to our ten-year history
of making stable releases.

Branching early works if you have a sufficiently large critical mass of
developers and testers who like to work on stabilizing a release, and
another sufficiently large critical mass of people who prefer to work
on pushing new features forward, plus enough extra manpower to deal with
keeping the two branches in sync.  If you lack any of those things it's
a loser.

There are certainly a small number of open source projects that have
enough popularity and enough ensuing manpower-and-expertise to make a go
of this approach.  To imagine that it's workable for the majority of
projects is to demonstrate lack of connection to reality.  To propose
that it become a distro-wide policy is so ... so ... well, I can't think
of an adjective that's fit to print.

			regards, tom lane