Hi Lenz:
Based on my experience with how folks comply with the current backporting rules,
I would not trust very many people (you are one of the exceptions!) to adhere to
this rule that bugfixes should be merged into master after fixing in octopus.
My expectation is that, once the a bug is fixed in octopus the second part
(merging into master) will be forgotten in many cases. After all, as you say:
that's the "actual branch that is currently used by the community" and once
the
bug is fixed there, the immediate thorn-in-the-side is gone!
Another thing I have learned is that any rule, in order to be effective, must be
policed. With the current horribly-imperfect-but-it's-what-we-have system, when
someone opens a PR targeting nautilus and we see that it's "original
research"
(to borrow a term from Wikipedia), we immediately see that. Policing is
relatively easy - we see at first glance that it's not a cherry-pick. Thanks to
GitHub, we can easily click on the SHA1 and check if it's present in the master
branch.
It sounds like your proposed new system is expecting developers will always
remember to forward-port to master *after* their bug has been fixed (or feature
implemented). But is that a realistic expectation? Would it be prudent to
include some reminder/enforcement mechanism? If so, how would it work?
Nathan