Re: address@hidden: Re: Possible help with stable Emacs releases.]

[Rob Browning]

Miles Bader <address@hidden> writes:

> I think it's a great idea if it starts from 21.4 like you said.

So I'm wondering a little about the details.  From some other
projects, I'm used to an aproach where an X.Y.0 (or just X.Y) release
is a "major" release, one which might break things, might have "more
adventurous" changes in it, and might not happen very frequently , and
an X.Y.Z (for Z > 0) release is just a bugfix release, which is made
"as often as needed".  (Of course, X.0.0 releases would represent an
even bigger change than X.Y.0 releases.)

In the above scenario, whenever an X.Y.0 release is made, an X.Y
branch would be created for work on subsequent X.Y.Z releases.
However, from some of the discussion, I'm not sure this maps as
directly to the Emacs development process as I'd first thought.

Just to make sure what we've been proposing is clear -- if this
proposal had been implemented with the 23.1 release, then rather than
just backporting fixes into the Debian tree, Jerome and I would have
been backporting those fixes into a new branch created during the 23.1
release, and then would have released 23.1.1, 23.1.2, etc. from there.

It would also be important to try to be careful that the changes to
the bugfix branch are minimal and uncontroversial (i.e. bug fixes
rather than giant patches with new features), so that the divergence
from the mainstream development branch is minimized, and so that it's
not likely that a new point-release would cause unintentional new
breakage.

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu
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