[Xapian-devel] Branching for 1.1

[Richard Boulton]

I should add that, as far as I can tell from our current plans, the 
change from 1.0 to 1.1 should be a lot less traumatic than the change 
from 0.9 to 1.0.  There's a fairly short list of planned deprecations, 
all of which have simple replacements (or need no replacement, because 
the originals did nothing!).  Other than these, code for 1.0 should 
simply need a recompile to work with 1.1.  So, it should be easy for 
users to upgrade to 1.1 if they want new features, and therefore I don't 
think there'll be a need to maintain 1.0 for long (if at all) after 1.1 
is released, and there is no need to backport new features to 1.0 after 
we've branched for 1.1 - just backporting bugfixes should suffice.

I'd hope (and I get the impression Olly strongly agrees here) that it 
only takes at most a couple of months to get from the point at which we 
branch for 1.1 to the point at which we release.  I think the 
replication stuff won't jeopardise this, and the other branches I'd like 
to merge will only be merged as and when they're stable enough to be 
released.

I think we should only do very small new features directly on HEAD while 
waiting for 1.1 - any more ambitious new features which we hope to get 
into 1.1 should be done in branches (for example, some work I'm about to 
start on for supporting geolocation searches).  Putting the replication 
stuff directly on HEAD was probably a mistake, but it's done now, and 
I'm not sure moving it to a branch would be worth the effort.

-- 
Richard