nontrivial features/bugfixes

[Vlad Skvortsov]

Greetings!

As you may have noticed, I've fallen behind with the development and now 
trying to catch up reviewing commits as old as r2362. There is quite a 
bit of pretty major changes that require a lot of modifications 
throughout the whole source tree. On one hand, per our guidelines, we 
want to do as fine-grained commits as possible. On the other hand, again 
-- per our own guidelines, we want all related changes to be grouped 
together. This is a clear call to use branches, in my opinion.

So, here is what I'd like to suggest:

* from now onwards all issues with complexity other than minor should be 
fixed on separate branches;
* all these feature branches should be included into autotest right from 
the start (yes, we can tolerate test failure messages on this list);
* commits on the branches should be as small as possible;
* merging back to trunk should be performed with approval (review) or at 
least a nod from two other developers;
* merging back to trunk can be performed in several large chunks (use 
your judgement);
* commit message for merged chunks should contain revision range and 
statement listing people having approved the merge ("Merging r3456-3490 
from /branches/XYZ. Approved by: gli, oleg").

I also encourage you guys to review all changes made by others. Comments 
are always welcome.

Please respond to this message with your opinions ASAP so that we can 
enforce the policy.

-- 
Vlad Skvortsov, vss at 73rus.com, http://vss.73rus.com