4.11 Branching

[Chris Johns]

On 5/05/2015 4:38 am, Joel Sherrill wrote:
> 
> On May 4, 2015 1:36:42 PM CDT, Sebastian Huber <sebastian.huber at embedded-brains.de> wrote:
>> There is for sure a lot to do before the release, but in terms of
>> features the master branch is ready to turn into the 4.11 branch.  We
>> can do all release related stuff on this branch. 

Yes this is true but I would rather we all contribute to getting us over
the hump of the processes and procedures, the ftp server clean up, wiki
pages etc so 4.11 is able to be released in a timely manner after the
branch is created. It is a lot of work and help from everyone will make
it happen quicker. I have started on the top level with
https://devel.rtems.org/wiki/Developer/Release and Joel is working from
the bottom up with various commands etc. Review, comments and testing
all help.

Amar has done a huge amount of fantastic work in the servers and we need
to clean these up. It is not up to him to do this, it is our
responsibility. The ftp area has things all over it that make the
content confusing and difficult to navigate. I will try and review the
contents and get try and make something sane out of what we have.
Sebastian I would welcome your help.

Again yes we could branch, but I would rather we did not until we have
our house in order.

>> With Git it is easy
>> to back port changes provided the file system structure remains intact.
>> There is no need to delay the RTEMS development.

It is not a technical matter, it is a management one. We have just got a
newlib snapshot from Jeff and so I will now update all the RSB configs
and that means we need to rebuild all the tools and then the BSPs.
Joel's previous build exposed breakage in the m68k bsps from a recent
commit and so this highlights the need to do this. Yes we could so this
after the branch point but for me that is not so important and it just
creates more work back porting.

>>  I have currently more
>> than two man months of patches pending and some of them will be
>> difficult to merge if someone else works on cleanup patches with the
>> current master.  We have the FreeBSD timecounters, the watchdog
>> changes, a new thread queue implementation, fine grained locking for
>> events, message queues and semaphores, a rework of the thread priority
>> change procedure.

Is this for 4.12, 4.13 or something else ? Joel would like a release
after 4.11 where we just remove things we no longer want such as kernel
kicks, some BSPs and other things. It should be a short release cycle
and it makes 4.11 a place holder for things we want removed. What
happens post 4.11 is open for discussion.

Opening master would let you commit a large body of work that requires
reviewing and this would happen while we are trying to find time to
complete the remaining release items.

> 
> I am not opposed to making the branch but let's wait for Chris to wake up and comment.
> 

The items I see we need to address in no particular order are:

1. Release procedures and doco.
2. Release script tested up to the final push to the RTEMS server.
3. Cleaned up the current git repo list and archiving the deprecated ones.
4. FTP area clean up.
5. Website news items and changes to point to 4.11.
6. Wiki pages updated to reflect the release change.
7. Wiki pages under TRB need to be reviewed and move if possible. This
one is a wish more than anything.

Chris