In the context of Git’s advantages (objective) over SVN, does the easier merging/branching features of Git make code freezing irrelevant when using Git (or equivalent)? Did the concept of code freezing come about because merging later is so hard?
I realize that this might be a subjective question but I really want to know if the phrase “code freeze” is antiquated or indicative of a project that isn’t branching and merging easily. If you could branch and merge automatically, would you ever code freeze? I don’t think you would because you could topic/feature branch locally and continue development knowing that merging would be easy.
While it is true, that you can continue doing feature and “risky” development, easy branching and merging does in no way obsolete code freezes.
You either freeze the release branch and hope people will still work on it or freeze master and hope more people will help with the final release blockers’ removal and polishing (they’re practically forced if they don’t know the SCM well).
Apart from release code quality, code freezes are crucial for translators, since a code freeze is usually accompanied by a string freeze, at which point it finally makes sense to fix up translations completely.