On Thu, 12 Jan 2012 23:46:46 -0400, David Bremner <david@tethera.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:25:38 +0100, Pieter Praet <pieter@praet.org> wrote:
> > On Sat, 31 Dec 2011 23:22:46 -0400, David Bremner <david@tethera.net> wrote:
> 
> > with differing hashes), this has the potential of causing confusion
> > and/or quite some extra work when debugging using git-bisect(1), so
> > I'd like to propose that bugfixes for (to-be-)released code are only
> > applied on the 'maint' branch ('release' in the case of Notmuch),
> > and then immediately merged back into 'master'.  In fact, this would
> > preferrably happen after *every* (series of) commit(s) on the 'maint'
> > branch, to prevent issues like [1].
> 
> There is some merit it to this. On the other hand, it makes the history
> messier.  [1] would have also been prevented by making the patch against
> the right branch.

I thought about this a bit more, and I agree that at least the release
candidates (basically anything tagged on branch release) ought to be
merged back to master. Since any series of bugfix patches seems to be
cause for a new release candidate, this should avoid the need to have
doubly applied patches.

I'm less convinced about the need to merge every little doc change and
debian packaging change back to master right away. This might be a
purely aesthetic objection; I'm not sure if the extra merge commits
cause any problems for e.g. bisection.

d