Yes absolutely bug fix releases are key to stability and give us more
freedom to do changes in minor releases.
Until last year I was responsible for the internal camel and cxf
distributions at a germany energy company.
CXF could normally be used as is. If there were any bugs then typically
the next bugfix release had them fixed.
For camel I almost always had to maintain an internal bugfix release. As
camel only had minor versions every version contained the fixes but also
a lot of changes.
With these changes we often hist another issue again that prevented us
from rolling it out. So I ended up with taking the patches for the
issues that were important for us and
compiled my own bugfix release from the minor release we used. That
worked really well. As camel now supports bugfix releases I guess most
times this will not be necessary anymore for users.
I do not think backporting to as many versions as possible is a good
idea though. Typically having one or two maintained older version should
be ok for most occasions. That is because porting to older
versions is tpyically increasingly more work and every version to
maintain is generally a lot of additional work.
On the other hand we could have releases for older versions that are
requested by paying users of the companies that support camel
development. So this long term support could be a way for these
companies to get support contracts but still
having the results in the open as camel releases.
Christian
Am 09.09.2011 11:21, schrieb Björn Bength:
Hi,
This is one reason to have more "bug fix" releases like 2.5.1, 2.7.2,
2.8.1 etc
and make an effort to back port important bug fixes to as many
"stable" camel versions as possible.
Then I think slight api changes is more tolerable to end users.
Björn
--
--
Christian Schneider
http://www.liquid-reality.de
Open Source Architect
Talend Application Integration Division http://www.talend.com
