KFW releases off the trunk will become harder as 1.7 features start getting used

[Danny Mayer]

Sam Hartman wrote:
> 
> One long-running aspect of our release process is that the trunk is
> allowed to take advantage of features on the trunk.  In particular
> this means things like as we get new implementations of CCAPI, KIM and
> other APIs available, we'll want to start using them.  And we don't
> generally support backward compatibility for this sort of change.
> 
> One consequence of this is that we may start running into cases where
> specific changes to KFW will end up depending on the 1.7 release or
> at least the 1.7 release branch.  I'd expect to get to a point in a
> few months where any significant changes to KFW would depend on 1.7.
> 
> We've been traditionally very reluctant to pull significant features
> for future releases back to old release branches.  I'd expect Tom to
> continue that practice.  We may develop more well defined guidelines
> for when pull-ups are appropriate, but I would expect anything we came
> to consensus on to be relatively conservative in this regard.
> 
> There may be projects that we want to consider and try and avoid
> blocking behind 1.7.  I think that quite soon, we're going to want to
> establish a deadline for any such project to be proposed and for us to
> at least have the community discussion about whether we want to avoid
> blocking the projects behind 1.7.
> 
> Kevin, I'd appreciate it if you could work with Jeff and anyone else
> who has an opinion and decide on a deadline by which projects that
> want to avoid being blocked behind 1.7 must be proposed.
> 
> I think that shorter than two weeks from today would be unrealistic.
> I think that a deadline beyond Jan 15 would probably be too long.
> 
> 
> One specific concern I have is the NIM 2.0 work.  There was a project
> proposal over the summer for the user experience.  However there
> hasn't been any proposals made regarding technical impact or how the
> user experience would be accomplished.
> 
> That's fine, but until such proposals are reviewed, we as a group
> won't be in a position to avoid taking NIM 2.0 design into account and
> avoid making things harder for NIM 2.0.
> 

I'm more than a little puzzled by this. The two major applications that
I've been involved in: BIND 9 and NTP have the Windows sources
integrated with the trunk and there are no branches (except for the
usual delivery of older version bug fixes). Is it really necessary for
KfW to be different from the kerberos source tree? There is some
Windows-specific code but that's the same in BIND9 and NTP.

It becomes a major effort to maintain divergent source trees.

Danny
> 
> 
> Thanks for your consideration
> 
> --Sam