[Dev] Alpha releases and omnibus commits

[Katie Capps Parlante]

Jeffrey Harris wrote:
>> Branching is less constraining from a development standpoint but there's
>> the added burden of committing to 2 branches for a substantial amount of
>> time, something we may want to avoid right now. Eventually (when we have
>> a big enough community of committers), branching might be the only way
>> to go though.
> 
> This relates, I think, to how atomic our commits are.  One of the points
> in the Fogel book seemed to be that it's important to make atomic
> commits, splitting changes into the smallest logical part.  I think if
> we did that more consistently, the pain of committing to two branches
> would be somewhat lessened.

Also from the Fogel book: "Merging has an important corollary: never 
commit the same change twice."

Getting into the regular practice of requiring developers to commit the 
same change to 2 branches scares me. Presumably if we avoid omnibus 
commits, we could also be merging changes from branch to branch.

Cheers,
Katie