[Vm-dev] the purpose of CI

[K K Subbu]

On Friday 02 June 2017 12:28 AM, Fabio Niephaus wrote:
> As Tim F. already mentioned, the initial idea was to use Cog as the dev
> branch, and the master for stable releases. Unfortunately, we don't have a
> working procedure for releasing new OpenSmalltalkVMs. I dared to create
> releases when we "had to" and after I asked Eliot for his recommendation.

I admit to feeling a bit confused about this 'master'.

> But it would be much nicer to have more frequent releases which our CI
> infrastructure allows us to do.

+1. Eliot is right in proposing in an earlier post on taking a step back 
to look at the overall design now that we have Git and CI.

My understanding of a master branch is the opposite of what is described 
above :-(. In a typical project, it is the master (or trunk) branch 
which is under active development and receives a stream of feature and 
repair patches. At some point of stability, it undergoes a feature 
freeze and starts taking in only repairs. Freeze helps get more eyeballs 
on clearing bug backlog yielding a series of candidate releases 
culminating in 'public release', tagged and branched to a maintenance 
branch. The master is then opened up for feature patches and the cycle 
proceeds. Release branch is then actively maintained with security and 
compat patches for two cycles (so that git bisect can be used to trace 
regressions).

Regards .. Subbu