[webkit-dev] Branch Plan

[Maciej Stachowiak]

Hi Everyone,

Trunk has been closed to new feature development and risky changes in  
general for a long time. Most of the need to do heavy stabilization  
has passed. In the meantime, we have had feature-branch, which has  
recently been updated and brought much closer to trunk. It's time for  
trunk to reopen soon. If there are no objections, we'd like to execute  
the following sometime tomorrow:

1) Announce that trunk and feature-branch are temporarily closed to  
commits.

2) Create branches/safari-3-branch/ from trunk/. This is the branch  
that Apple will use for final stabilization of and updates to Safari  
3. We'd like to keep this branch Apple-managed, since we will have to  
comply with Apple-internal release engineering process. However, we  
welcome and encourage others to track this branch with their own  
stabilization branches, either in SVN or elsewhere. We may be able to  
merge in port-specific changes that do not affect the core code, but  
it's best not to assume such changes can go in.

3) Merge all patches one at a time from branches/feature-branch/ onto  
trunk/. We are doing this instead of just using an svn copy so that  
revisions on trunk remain in order, to allow tools like the nightlies  
and buildbots to maintain sanity and to make future history bisection  
searches to continue to work. At this point feature-branch/ will be  
obsolete and will be renamed to indicate this.

4) Announce that trunk is once again open for general development.

We will keep trunk nightlies and buildbots, and will add nightlies and  
buildbots for the stable branch as quickly as we can.

Note: if you are currently on feature-branch then you can follow the  
change transparently by using svn switch once trunk reopens.

If anyone has comments or objections, let me know. We will likely pull  
the trigger on this tomorrow afternoon (US Pacific time).

Regards,
Maciej