Should we rename the MASTER forest?

Mark Reinhold mr at sun.com
Fri Nov 16 16:53:51 UTC 2007


> Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2007 11:31:10 +0000
> From: Andrew John Hughes <gnu_andrew at member.fsf.org>

> ...
> 
> Thinking more philosophically, I think the whole 'main branch is jdk7'
> simply comes down to a release-oriented approach within proprietary software
> in general, as opposed to the FOSS approach where releases are more offshots
> of the main development tree, with current development always retaining
> central focus.  After all, there is no need for a release in order to get
> hold of the code!

Granted, though I'm not sure I'd agree that the release-oriented approach
is specific to proprietary software.  It's a general technique that works
well to focus the attention of a large, distributed team on a specific
engineering goal, though it's by no means the only way to do so.

At any rate, as Roman pointed out, a distributed SCM like Mercurial tends
to blur the difference between the two approaches, as far as the code is
concerned.

- Mark



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