Basically, at any point when you don't have a lot of temporary gunk. I
confess, I'm of two minds about working on a branch for this sort of thing:
I consider it very impractical for things which don't break up into
pieces easily afterwards. GCC has been using an interesting approach,
which I think we could adapt and extend here.
GCC's approach relies on GCC's development cycle: break, fix, release.
You can only pull stuff in from those branches during the ``break''
phase. And during that phase, things, from what I've seen, really are
broken (I got stuck trying to commit a patch because I couldn't
build/test GCC for several weeks).How about a branch which require approval just like the mainline for
large patches, although giving David a little more freedom to play
around. Then, we'd allow large merges from the branch back to the
trunk when they were ready and tested - larger patches than we'd
normally accept all at once, because they'd already been approved.
Andrew - thoughts? Does it have any interesting possibilities?
Let me put it this way, I'm scared shitless of another HP jumbo patch.