RFC: icedtea-cacao branch vs. clone

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Christian,

On Wed, 2007-09-05 at 16:21 +0200, Christian Thalinger wrote:
> We're planing to set up a IcedTea repository that has all necessary
> patches to run with CACAO as VM.  These patches include one or two
> patches for the OpenJDK build system and a patch we need for the binary
> wrappers from OpenJDK because of a problem with Boehm-GC.
> 
> We should now decide what is better to use, a named branch or a seperate
> clone.  I'm, personally, in favor for a named branch, as merging with
> the default branch is very easy and we have a full history of all
> changes ever done in one single repository.
> 
> Other opinions?

We are still learning how to most effectively use mercurial as a group.
Personally I would have expected more people to just make clones of
icedtea and publish their own repos. But clearly people seem to like the
one shared repo approach even though technically that isn't really
necessary.

Since we are using a shared published repo at the time I think it makes
sense to go for a named branch in that one IF the intent is to merge
that branch eventually with the default one. Is the idea that
icedtea-cacao eventually just becomes a configure option for icedtea
proper?

Cheers,

Mark

P.S. I actually had to read up on named branches. The Mercurial manual
has a nice overview of "Managing releases and branchy development":
http://hgbook.red-bean.com/hgbookch8.html
And I thought the following Guided Tour of Mercurial focusing on working
together with branches and merging was nice:
http://blog.medallia.com/2007/02/a_guided_tour_of_mercurial.html