[Openmcl-devel] work in arm64 branch or on main branch?

[Robert Munyer]

On 6 January 2024, R. Matthew Emerson wrote:

> As I do little bits of work on an ARM64 port, is there any killer
> benefit to keeping that work in a separate arm64 git branch? I was
> thinking that committing to the main branch would make visibility
> better, and as long as the main branch always builds, the overhead
> of a long-lived branch seems not worth it.

When I thought about this question last summer, I concluded that
the answer depends on the vintage of the code that's being modified.

If I were modifying code that's current as of CCL 1.12.2
(e.g. the x86 compiler), I would put the changesets on trunk.

If I am modifying code that was last supported in CCL 1.10
(e.g. the PPC compiler), I should make a new branch that starts
at the last 1.10 changeset, to avoid having 1.10 code and 1.12.2
code being developed in the same branch at the same time.

(Another option would be to start by upgrading the PPC code to
1.12.2, but I've had difficulty finding a Linux distribution that
can run ppccl64; PPC64 Linux distros have gone little-endian.)

P.S. I don't claim any copyright on my arm64 changesets, so the
files in my repo are IP of whoever owns the files in the main repo.

-- Robert Munyer
https://ccl-arm64-2023-07.srht.site