> On Jan 20, 2017, at 12:47 PM, David Zuelke <d...@heroku.com> wrote: > > > I'd actually like to question the whole practice of porting features back to > older branches. I think that's the core reason why trunk is in total > disarray, and why no substantial releases have been made. There is just no > reason for anyone to push forward the state of 2.6 or even 3.0 if you can > just backport whatever you want. > > Just define 2.4 as "bug fixes only" the moment 2.6 is released, and start the > process of getting 2.6 out ASAP. In fact, why not declare 2.4 that right now? > It's already "stable". It doesn't need more features that suddenly change > behavior from 2.4.28 to 2.4.29 or whatever (that's the opposite of what users > are looking for).
Ummm... that's kind of the goal. You are telling us nothing we don't already know. The issue is that 2.6 has been stuck in a holding pattern, and it is unfair to our users, and our developers, to have good, useful features locked in trunk with no hope of reaching outside for some unknown amount of time. So, you say, the question is Why Not Work On 2.6 And Push Getting That Out. The reason is because some people then want/desire/demand huge restructurings in 2.6, which means, of course, that forking/ branching off 2.5/2.6 is the EASY part. The hard part is controlling the urge to then go "wild" on 2.5/2.6, which drastically increases the time until we finally get GA. And some people also want NO NEW FEATURES in 2.4 during this whole timeframe. I know, crazy. If I really was the dictator Bill tries to insinuate that I am, I would simply branch 2.5 *right now* off of trunk. And then say the goal is to get 2.5 stable enough to go GA as 2.6... no big restructuring, no huge and invasive API changes. These are all good, and needed, but if the goal is to make 2.4 our 2.2-like "stable and no new features" branch, we need a 2.6 that happens SOON. And finally, I don't believe at ALL that things are as dire as Bill claims nor that trunk is "in total disarray" as you state. I do appreciate the insight related to PHP. It goes well with the insight on how lots and lots of other projects handle this. But what works for PHP, a language, may not necessarily work for httpd, a commodity server.
