Re: patching the stable branch (was: Re: Octave 3.1.52 available for ftp)

[John W. Eaton]

On 12-Feb-2009, Søren Hauberg wrote:

| tor, 12 02 2009 kl. 11:53 -0500, skrev John W. Eaton:
| > Comments?
| 
| I agree! "stable" should be stable, which means as little as possible
| should change.

I would also like to add that there is nothing that says we even have
to provide a series of stable bug fixing releases.  But if we decide
to do that, then I would like to resist the urge to turn the stable
release series into a separate line of development with many changes
because I don't think that helps stability, and more importantly, it
is a time sink that takes effort away from the main development
branch.  Even importing changes from the development branch takes
time, and there is (as we have seen) the risk that importing those
changes can introduce new bugs, especially once the development branch
has changed significantly.

jwe