A while ago (half a year?) you changed the system so that you no longer merged individual commits to master and instead merged everything as huge batches of commits from development branches. I think the reason for switching to that system was to make master more stable.
Now that system in general is a bit problematic since it’s no longer possible to cherry pick individual commits and merge them into the local branch that’s used for development of the game. But master is definitely quite stable now, I don’t really see more bugs in master than there are in releases like 4.13 or 4.14. So I’m fine with that.
But what I really think should be improved is the frequency of merges from the development branches into master.
Let’s say someone uses master from today (7th december). Looking back from today, the last dates where other branches were merged:
Dev-Rendering: ----- Dec 03, 05 days ago
Dev-Core: ----------- Nov 23, 14 days ago
Dev-Framework: ---- Nov 16, 21 days ago
Dev-Blueprints: ----- Nov 11, 26 days ago
Dev-Editor: ---------- Oct 19, 49 days ago
Dev-Mobile: ---------- Oct 08, 60 days ago
Dev-Networking: ---- Oct 04, 64 days ago
Dev-Physics: --------- Oct 03, 65 days ago
Dev-VR: ------------- Sept 30, 68 days ago
On average thats 41 days.
Since I’m working on VR, I’m mostly interested in dev-rendering and dev-vr. The last dev-rendering merge war 5 days ago, that’s good. Before that it was another 3.5 weeks though. But the last dev-vr merge was whole 68 days ago! When you think about what a company the size of Epic can produce in 68 days that’s a lot. You can’t really call your master branch “master” any more like this, I think. It’s not master, it’s some branch where code needs on average almost 1.5 months to get into.
This get’s especially noticeable when into a branch like 4.14 that’s prepared for the 4.14.1 hotfix now there is merged some really interesting new stuff that’s not yet in master, because master has to wait for the huge commits from the development branches, while 4.14 gets some important commits directly. One quick example:
9 days ago, the 4.14 branch got this really interesting commit: https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/commit/af9d6262473492e4e9850133a128c95663ebb5be
So, 1 ms more performance for VR! That’s super awesome! But those that use master to get exactly something like that as fast as possible don’t have that yet. It’s not in master, so it will probably get merged with the next merge from Dev-VR where the last one was 68 days ago. That’s absurd when you think about what the reason for using master is, to get everything as fast as possible without having to wait for stable releases.
So I guess you could say that currently master is broken. Are there any plans from Epic to fix this?