Re: Moving Emacs 24.3 development to emacs-24 branch soon

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Chong Yidong writes:

 > As Stefan pointed out to me in a separate email, pushing will work, one
 > just has to set the bzr configuration variable append_revisions_only to
 > False.  The bzr tag doesn't seem to be discarded by the push, either; it
 > is still possible to check it out with -r TAGNAME afterward.

Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should.

It is best current practice, accepted in many projects, to make a
branch for each feature release.  The primary rationale (keeping
bugfix and security releases in different release branches from
stepping on each other, and keeping feature code from accidentally
leaking across releases) doesn't apply to Emacs since Emacs only
supports one release at a time.  Nevertheless, third parties do
maintain such branches for various reasons.  Things are simpler for
everybody if each release has its own branch.

Rebasing also theoretically messes up the bloodlines.  The code in the
24.3 release is *not* a child of the 24.2 release, it is a sibling.
The rebase ends up unnecessarily duplicating all the history on the
trunk in the branch.

If you have some specific benefit of rebasing onto the existing minor
release branch, OK, I don't see a *high* probability of *serious*
trouble from doing it.  But I don't really see any benefit from it,
except preserving a formal linearity of the 24.x branch, which doesn't
reflect the way development actually occurred.

Steve