Re: another gnulib update

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Hi Bruno,

On 25 Feb 2007, at 18:25, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Eric Blake wrote:
> > Eventually, when the move to git is complete, doing this will be  
> > easy -
> > you just make a branch in your local git copy of gnulib, and base  
> > your m4
> > release off of that branch.
>
> git will certainly help in doing so.
>
> But what Gary also wants is the knowledge, that we 4 (you, Paul,  
> Jim, me) have:
> what is a good starting point and what additional patches are  
> recommended
> on top of that.

Yes indeed, but I don't only want it for me.  I'm hoping we can come
up with a (semi-)automated way of providing that information to all
current and future gnulib client projects.

> For today, I would say, take as starting point the day before the  
> <time.h>
> and <string.h> changes, a month ago. Then each of us can give Gary  
> a list of
> recommended ChangeLog entries that he can integrate in his "branch".

Is there any reason why every now again a particular revision of the
gnulib tree can't be blessed as the stable branch point, and change sets
that are purely bugfixes marked as such?  That would mean anyone that
wants to build a local stable branch for the release of their own
gnulib-using-project can take the most recently blessed revision and
cherry pick the relevant bugfix changesets.

> > > Is there perhaps some way to cleverly tag the CVS tree of gnulib to
> > > avoid this problem?
>
> Hardly. Often it's clear only after two or three weeks whether a patch
> was good or not. We don't know at the moment the patch is committed.

True enough.

I think that my argument depends on whether we can reach a consensus
that gnulib has reached a tipping point where the extra work for the
gnulib contributors (blessing releases and marking bugfix changesets
as such) saves a greater amount of work by gnulib users (trying to
work out how to build a good stable gnulib snapshot to release their
project against).

Cheers,
        Gary
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