[sakai2-tcc] Maintenance Branches: Enhancement vs Bug Merges

[Beth Kirschner]

The line between a "bug" and and "enhancement" is sometimes blurry (especially if we broaden the definition of "bug" to include usability problems). Additionally there are often small enhancements, low in risk and high in impact that have to wait a full year for release to the community code base because of our policy of only merging bug-fixes into maintenance branches. Some institutions can mitigate these long waits by maintaining their own release branches (msub) and pulling in enhancements early. Not everyone has the resources to to this.

I'd like to propose that we rationalize the process for merging small tasks & enhancements into a maintenance branch as follows:

Small enhancements and tasks may be merged into a maintenance branch if the following conditions are met:
1) The change is narrow in scope (modest changes to a single project)
2) The change does not require database changes
3) The change is running in production at some institution

An example of a good candidate for this type of task is http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-11003, which is running in production at multiple institutions (merged to their institutions's msub branches), but which will not be available to the broader Sakai community until 2.8 is released.

This conversation feels familiar to me and it seems we may have discussed and agreed to this in the past, but wanted to bring up the topic with this group for a discussion and vote.

Thoughts?
- Beth