[glandium]

Author here.

> my goodness did they beat around the bush w/regard to their actual contribution to this process (per the title).

Fair point. I came up with the title first. Then as the content grew large and diluted the essence of the title, I reconsidered, but ended up sticking to it as a shameless clickbait.

> Originally, separate clones was the recommended way to do "topic branches" in Mercurial (not to be confused with "named branches").

That still leaves the question "why topic branches rather than named branches?". For the needs of the rapid release process, named branches could have been used, but weren't. I haven't tried to contact the people involved at the time to have a definite answer. It's not /that/ important, and I'm not /that/ curious.

[lynguist]

What a beautiful post it has become nevertheless rivaling the long reads of the New Yorker and the like.

I originally wanted to go to sleep but the writing was too captivating to put down, and every paragraph was motivated, and it wasn’t stretched. It was the length it needed to be.

[LegNeato]

One of the Firefox rapid release designers here :-)

IIRC, topic branches were used because:

- Mercurial named branches were half baked at the time and I was advised against them by folks who knew hg better than me.

- We were already using separate clones for security update versions (3.5.x and 3.6.x) so we just kept doing the same. Some tooling could be reused.

- Rapid release was a big change and we didn't want to disrupt mozilla-central dev. Having rapid release in different clones got us out of the way and reduced the risk of negatively affecting development. m-c was the domain of developers, the rr repos were the domain of the release team.

[glandium]

Hey Christian! :)

[kbrosnan]

Tracking down preed, JST, joduin, bsmedberg, etc might turn up stories.

Some of it is captured by preed in https://soberbuildengineer.com/blog/2006/11/version-control-... and announcing hg in https://soberbuildengineer.com/blog/2007/04/version-control-...

JST post on bzr vs hg perf, https://web.archive.org/web/20070219012211/http://weblogs.mo...

[glandium]

If you look closely, I linked to preed's posts. :) (look for "colorful")

Jst's post is linked from the second one. (but is a dead link)

[maccard]

> Fair point. I came up with the title first. Then as the content grew large and diluted the essence of the title, I reconsidered, but ended up sticking to it as a shameless clickbait.

I enjoyed it. It could maybe have been two posts, but it's a headline, it's supposed to get you to click on it.

And it's true, too.