[freeside-devel] Freeside development policies

[Ivan Kohler]

On Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 03:11:54PM -0300, Fernando M. Kiernan wrote:
> Hi, I’m starting again my work on Freeside and, having three development
> branches on git, I would want to know what are the future policies about
> versión releasing in order to focus my work (mainly dedicated to
> localization) on the best posible option as I don’t have so much time
> available.

tl;dr short version: Base your contributions and pull requests or 
patches on the master branch.  Backporting to 4.x should be fairly 
easy/straightforward for the next few years (probably just a 
cherry-pick).


> The main questions raised on my mind until now are:
> - Will be a new 3.x release (3.9)?

Yes, probably one more maintenance release.

After 4.0 releases, 3.x will be updated/maintained for at least one 
year, maybe up to two years.  Changes will become increasingly 
conservative and eventually for critical bug/security fixes only.

For your purposes in merging localizaion work, I would ignore the 3.x 
branch.  That ship has sailed.


> - Will the 4.x branch have a long life and version releases in some moment?

4.0 will release soon.  The 4.x branch will be maintained for several 
years, until at least one year after 5.0 is released, possibly longer.


> - Whick is the intended difference between 4.x and 5.x branch as I see the
> majority of the commits (almost all of them) are the same for both branches?

At this time there is very little difference between 4.x and master/5.x.  

Eventually, there will be big/intrusive changes that we decide not to 
backport to 4.x, and master/5.x will start to diverge more.


> I’ve many localization patches for 5.x git (around 150) and I know many of
> them will not backport to 4.x automatically, so if 4.x will have a long life
> I think I’ll have to take some time to do that work


We'd certainly appreicate it!  It will allow your work to get out to 
folks sooner and they will be able to contribute more easiliy.


-- 
Ivan Kohler
President and Head Geek, Freeside Internet Services, Inc.  http://freeside.biz/
Debian GNU/Linux developer  |  CPAN author  |  cat person  |  ski addict