Re: marking old branches as no longer maintained

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 19:46, Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> wrote:
>
> I'd like to add a feature to the buildfarm that automatically picks up any
> new branch and automatically stops building any branch we're not maintaining
> any more. To do the latter, I need some way for the client to detect that we
> are or aren't interested in a branch. What I'd like to do is add a file to
> the old back branches (say from 7.4 to 8.1 currently - I can grandfather the
> rest) called "end-of-life-reached" or some such, with some appropriate text.
> As a branch reaches its end of life, i.e. right before the last release we
> make, we should add that file to the branch.

Does this need to be driven out of the main tree? Couldn't you just
have a "blacklist" in the buildfarm code or site? (disclaimer: I
haven't looked at how it works so that may be a completely useless
idea..)

Another way would be to just not run bulids if there are no commits in
<n> days on a branch. Don't we already not run builds on branches with
no comments? Maybe just put a limit on how long we allow an override
of that?

> I think this would possibly be useful anyway, regardless of buildfarm
> utility - I still hear of people mistakenly grabbing and building releases
> past EOL, and maybe this will give one or two the extra clue they need that
> this is less than a good idea.

If you want that to actually work, you probably need to do something
to the point of breaking the configure script. There's zero chance of
people who're not reading the information about which releases are
supported are actually going read a random file somewhere in the
source tree, regardless of where you place it and what you name it.

You could reqiure something like "./configure
--yes-i-know-what-i-am-doing" or something like that, I guess...

> Comments?

--
 Magnus Hagander
 Me: http://www.hagander.net/
 Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/