Re: after 3.2

[Thomas Weber]

Am Freitag, den 13.03.2009, 04:07 -0400 schrieb John W. Eaton:
> On 13-Mar-2009, Thomas Weber wrote:
> 
> | That said, is there really a need to have two branches, stable and
> | development? It seems the Linux kernel works quite nicely with just one
> | branch.
> 
> So just dismiss with the updates to the stable releases, and only have
> a series of releases?

Yes.

> That's fine with me, but it doesn't give people a lot of comfort when
> there are bugs in a release and the next one might be N months away
> and introduce a lot of new untested features that could cause more
> trouble even if there are fixes for the problems found in the previous
> release.

<shrug> 
It seems people are okay with that in the kernel.


> The goal of the stable release series is to converge on something
> that is more or less free of show-stopping bugs, even if it doesn't
> have all the latest features.  But I'm not sure we do a good job of
> that when we do more than fix regressions (and possibly other serious
> bugs) in the stable release.  As Jaroslav noted, transplanting patches
> from the development tree can have a destabilizing effect as the two
> branches diverge.

Yes, but why are those patches transplanted? Simple, they fix bugs that
have been reported by users. So, not fixing them means users might be
totally unable to use the stable branch for whatever their specific
problem is.

        Thomas