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RE: patching the stable branch (was: Re: Octave 3.1.52 available for ft


From: Schirmacher, Rolf
Subject: RE: patching the stable branch (was: Re: Octave 3.1.52 available for ftp)
Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:32:11 +0100

>From a user perspective far away of the internals, I would like to advocat a
more pragmatic view:

There are some major fields of development and/or re-design in the devel
branch at the moment (e.g. objects, graphics, Jaroslav's numeric
optimisations). There are major changes in the code and cross-porting
bug-fixes to stable is tedious and risky in this fields. So, it should not
be done.

On the other side, iff we have bugs in other fields, which might be fixed
easily in both branches (in the best case: by the same patch as the code did
not change by now), we should probably do so. 

The decision should probably be made by the maintainer of the stable
release.

This is of course not a clear black-white policy, but perhaps a reasonable
scheme...


Think about why it is so intersting to get fixes in the "stable" release: I
would say it is mainly due to the fact that there are well-supported binary
distributions of these releases and many users are using packaged
distributions. Often, they might not even be able to re-build from the
sources. So, they want a fix for their personal bug in the release available
to them for use (i.e. binary). So, unless we want to generate regular binary
distributions of devel snapshots, the stable binary distributions are the
only chance for many users to get fixes. Having a pragmatic policy as the
one outlined above would be very helpful to these users while keeping the
maintainer effort reasonable limited. 

Just my 2 ct,

Rolf



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