[TYPO3-core] Gerrit submission process for multiple branches

[Ernesto Baschny]

Markus Klein schrieb am 31.10.2011 17:27:
> Georg Ringer wrote:
>>
>> it's a pitty that "the community" is very small in this case and just thinking of
>> the last security sprint: much of the time went into backporting just to all of
>> those branches.
>>
>> if someone finds the time to do patches for this so old 4-3 and there are
>> enough votes, everything will go into the core. there is no magic about it, just
>> someone has to do it and my personal opinion: I prefer working for master,
>> 4-5 then for for anything else
> 
> Indeed, that's a valid opinion. But the problem of missing patches for these older branches is more or less home-made, since it was simply forgotten to merge the existing patches to these branches. So it shouldn't be that much of a deal to catch up, since voting can be omitted in most cases.
> I'm willing to push patch sets for those issues that seem to be forgotten (thanks to Ernesto for his tool).

Not quite true, because you need a full review for *all* branches and
not just "blindly" merge backported fixes from upper versions.

A bugfix in "master" doesn't mean it doesn't introduce side-effects that
affect only a particular release (e.g. 4.3 for example) because of a
different (older) API or different system requirements. The 4.3 patch
needs to work with PHP 5.2 and IE6 anymore. And it has to rely on
4.3-API only, which is some times not really forward-compatible (e.g
added parameter in function calls...).

This annoyances makes it important that the backported fix gets *tested*
and we can only guarantee that by doing the full workflow of the review
process. This is especially important for older (stable) releases, where
people expect stuff to simply *work* upon upgrade and not *break*
(regression), which is in most cases much more dangerous than simply not
providing the bugfix.

The only really exception from the backporting "blindly" would be real
no-brainer-fixes, which clearly don't call the API or don't rely on
special PHP code (e.g. spelling fixes, logic-fixes within one function,
etc..).

In case of doubt, leave it for reviewing and put some reminder in the
typo3.core list to get attention to it.

Cheers,
Ernesto



-- 
Ernesto Baschny
Core Developer V4 Team
Release Manager TYPO3 4.5

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