The definition of "as many versions as possible" must of course be decided. But ought to be greater than 0 (zero).
Backporting and patch-releasing bug fixes are already done today by, for instance, fusesource and yourself earlier. To add value for their customers. However, I think some attention on the Apache bug fix releases is, in the longer run, necesseray. Of course it requires resources, that often is busy full time with their own customer's projects. The full steam ahead on trunk has been impressive though, but it's been a bumpy road :-) regards björn On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 11:43 AM, Christian Schneider <ch...@die-schneider.net> wrote: > 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 > >
