How ready is findutils 4.3.x for use as a "stable" release?

[James Youngman]

All,

Following the Google Summer of Code, we have a number of significant
functional changes queued up for merging into findutils.   These
include:

1. Better support for systems that tell you the value of ARG_MAX but
then don't honour command lines of that length.

2. Support in find for various kinds of extended file attribute

3. A C replacement for updatedb.


This work was done by Leslie Polzer.  I contributed occasional
improvements, the command pipeline support for updatedb, and regular
merges of the trunk code to minimise the eventual burden of merging.

You can take a look at Leslie's changes at
http://repo.or.cz/w/findutils.git?a=shortlog;h=polzer

There is a significant amount of functional change here, and so we
need to choose between making a new stable release containing more or
less the current 4.3.x branch, and deferring a new stable release
until some of Leslie's code has been merged in.

Because of the size of Leslie's changes, this would likely mean
significant delays to the production of a new stable release.

I think my personal preference would be to make a 4.4.0 "stable"
release, and merge Leslie's changes into a new "development" release
4.5.x.   But this approach only works if the 4.3.x code is stable
enough to form the basis of a new stable release.

What say you?

James.