Development and Release Process

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Revision as of 22:22, 13 December 2012 by Deadalnix (talk | contribs) (Add how to add feature)
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This page is intended to serve as a working paper to capture the essential aspects of a current discussion on the D forum concerning an improved D development and release process. As such, it should not be taken as official (until approved by Andrei), but it is to serve as a centralized location for the current proposal, so that the details won't be scattered throughout multiple disjoint forum messages and ultimately lost in the mists of time.

To keep things civil, the convention is that if something on this page doesn't match how you understand it should be, you should start a discussion on the talk page before making the change.

Goals

  • To provide D users with a stable version of D that receives only critical bugfixes, that they can build on
  • To provide a place for adequate testing of new features before they are officially included in D
  • To allow the D developers to continue to develop the language without being hampered by the fear of breaking large amounts of existing code

Release a new version of D

The staging branch in git contains a version in stabilization. This version will be the next release of D. When it is judged stabilized enough to be released, a branch is created for this new release. The name of the branch is D2.N+1, where N is the previous version of D2 .

git checkout staging
git branch 2.N+1
git checkout 2.N+1

Then, a tag is created.

git tag 2.N+1.0

Packaging is done as usual based on the content of the tag.

Now that the release is done, we must prepare for the next release ! The current dev version, which is in master branch will be merged into staging to be stabilized.

git checkout staging
git merge master

XXX: Should we rebase here ? It make the branch tree more simple, but is more painful

At this point, staging receive bug fixes and the cycle start again.

Release a revision of a released version of D

A revision can be published on an already released version of D. Revision include bug fixes, but no new feature. We supposed bug fixes has been included into branch 2.N where N is the released version of D we want to update. M is the last revision number that have been published.

git checkout 2.N
git tag 2.N.M+1

Packaging is done as usual based on the content of the tag.

Working on a new feature

New feature are based on master. You will do your own branch to develop the feature, and propose it to e merged into master. In order to make the merge easy, it is your responsibility to ensure that your feature is rebased on master and that conflict are solved.

TODO: Write how synchronoize local git repos with official DPL repos

git checkout master
git branch myfeature
git checkout myfeature

Now you are ready to work on the wonderful feature you have in mind. During your development, you have to keep in sync with master. This is how it is done :

git checkout myfeature
git rebase master

At this point, conflict may happen, this is up to you to solve them (Note, we should write something on that).

When the feature is ready, push ! Then go on github and propose a pull request.