NetBSD development process, workflow

[Marc Balmer <marc%msys.ch@localhost>]

While we certainly can manage any DVCS tool imo (after all we develop a whole operating system…), I think there are some issues that need to be addressed on „an upper layer“ first.  It’s more about processes than tools and the like.

One issue is certainly workflows, and I am now looking at this issue quite in-depth (why I am doing that? I am moving a fairly large repository away from subversion to a DVCS @work, and I am preparing this for the last months.  And that meant to dig deep into the topic, read books etc..).

Before actually proposing a very concrete workflow, I think we should briefly stop here and become aware of the goals of a development workflow. I think these are our goals, please add yours.  Once we have these goals (and most folks agree with them), I can work on the concrete workflow.

So the goals are:

- Develop on a master/head branch from wich the next release will eventually be made.
- Create a feature branch to work on anything particular, and when that work is tested ond ready to go in, merge it to the master branch.
- Be able to support multiple releases at one time.
- Back port features from the master branch to a release.
- Fix bugs in releases, and propagate bug fixes to the master branch.
- Create patchlevel releases from releases, after features have been backported or bugs have been fixed.

What have I missed?