Freeze or no freeze?

[Augie Fackler]

> On Jul 24, 2018, at 12:57, Martin von Zweigbergk via Mercurial-devel <mercurial-devel at mercurial-scm.org> wrote:
> 
> The code freeze just started. I'd like to start a discussion about no longer having freezes.
> 
> Some benefits of not having a freeze:
> 
> * Patch authors won't have to wait so long for feedback and won't risk going as far in the wrong direction
> * Review load gets spread out a little more evenly
> * Those who don't particular care about running only released versions won't have to wait so long for new features and bug fixes to land on the default branch
> 
> I'm personally affected by all those points, at least to some degree. I'm mentioning that just so my bias is clear.
> 
> As I understand it, the reason we have the freeze is in order to convince people to test the release candidate and not a later version from the default branch. I believe it's effective in achieving that (I mean that I think most people do not instead run their own patched version). However, I'm not sure we would find that many fewer bugs if we queued patches for the default branch while the release candidate is out. It obviously happens that a bug from the stable branch gets fixed by patch to the default branch (and people testing on the default branch would thus not notice the bug on the stable branch), but my impression is that that is pretty rare.
> 
> Thoughts? Were there other reasons for the code freeze that I missed?

AIUI that's basically it. Is the suggestion that we keep landing things on default and merge stable into default as we go, basically?

I'm +0.5 on this - I won't fight for it too hard, but in general I think we're in a good enough place test-coverage wise that we're not finding major regressions during the freeze anymore. I'd be enthusiastic about trying this in the next cycle and if it doesn't go completely sideways we could stick with it.

> 
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