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Re: stable branches for Gnulib


From: Bernhard Voelker
Subject: Re: stable branches for Gnulib
Date: Sat, 10 Sep 2022 19:10:23 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/102.2.1

On 9/10/22 15:51, Bruno Haible wrote:
Maintaining a stable branch is a small amount of work every month. It does
not even need to happen on a regular schedule. Even a schedule of 3 months
is OK.

I don't have a strong opinion about it.  Here are just my loose thoughts about 
it.

a) Topic branches
I personally don't think this is a good idea for gnulib, because most likely
nobody but the author will use the topic branch until it gets merged into master
(or a stable branch).

b) Stable branches.
Can help, but see the following from the gnulib users' point of view (upstream
and downstream).

Other use cases:

1. New upstream / GNU package release.
Usually, GNU maintainers pull in the latest changes from gnulib before making
a new release.  Well, at that time, a lot of platform tests are done, and
most problems are found instantly, I'd say.
If not, well, then the issue gets fixed in gnulib and a re-release is done
with a newer version.

2. Downstream builds.
2a) New downstream build for a new upstream release.
When a new upstream version of a package doesn't work, then either the 
downstream
maintainer can pick the fix from gnulib as a patch, or the upstream maintainer
will do another release (see above), or at least have gnulib updated to the fix
in the package repo.

2b) Aging release failing to build on newer build environment.
Well, usually, the downstream maintainer will simply pick the fix from gnulib
(or the thereby updated upstream) to make the package work again.

As said above, I don't have a strong preference, but as (low-frequent, sigh) 
gnulib
contributor, GNU package maintainer using gnulib, and distro downstream 
maintainer
I didn't have a problem with gnulib stability so far over the past years.

Thanks & have a nice day,
Berny




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