Re: stable branches (was Re: [PATCH 0/8] maintenance patches)

[Kamil Dudka]

On Tuesday, January 05, 2016 17:28:03 James Youngman wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 1:31 PM, Kamil Dudka <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On Monday 04 January 2016 15:17:24 James Youngman wrote:
> >> c) I'd like input from the other committers and from the principal
> >> downstream consumers (e.g. Andreas, Kamil) before making a choice,
> >> since it's the committers who would need to maintain the parallel
> >> branches and the downstream maintainers who (allegedly) benefit.
> >> Let's have a data-based discussion about what works for everyone - in
> >> a separate thread, I'd suggest.
> > 
> > Fedora and RHEL maintainers backport mainly fixes for bugs that are
> > reported via Red Hat Bugzilla.  At the same time, we update to the latest
> > upstream release in the development version of Fedora, from which the
> > stable Fedora releases are branched each 6 months approx.
> > 
> > As an example, these are the findutils versions we currently maintain:
> > 
> > findutils-4.6.0  - in Fedora rawhide (the development version of Fedora)
> > findutils-4.5.16 - in Fedora 23 (released on November 3rd, 2015)
> > findutils-4.5.14 - in Fedora 22 (released on May 26th, 2015)
> > findutils-4.5.11 - in RHEL-7 (released on June 9th, 2014)
> > findutils-4.4.2  - in RHEL-6 (released on November 9th, 2010)
> > 
> > If there are "stable" branches for upstream findutils, I will be happy to
> > share any backports that apply, to make them available to other downstream
> > distributions with a similar release cycle.  If there is a linear history
> > only, it will also work for us.
> 
> Just to be very clear, I think this means that you (like Bernhard)
> don't think you derive much benefit from the distinction between
> "stable" (ftp.gnu.org) and "development" (alpha.gnu.org) releases of
> findutils?
> 
> Thanks,
> James.

Yes.  We stabilize the packages ourselves, based on the feedback provided by 
users of our distribution(s).  Backporting fixes proactively is not really
something we would expect from upstream.

I was more thinking about sharing the backports (namely for security issues) 
by downstream consumers, but using upstream branches for that is probably an 
overkill.  We can just post such patches to a mailing-list for those who are 
interested.

Kamil