On Thursday, 14 November 2013 at 00:37:38 UTC, Tyro[17] wrote:
Bugfix releases (2.064.1)
Based on the previous major release or bugfix; contains
only bugfixes and perhaps documentation corrections.
Your thoughts and concerns please.
Do you happen to work with me? We have two dozens of such
releases branch :) And customers still tend to prefer the
slightly bleeding edge ones.
While this effectively _does_ work in creating more stable
releases, I think that it puts all the burden on the developers
in a way that is difficult to ignore.
Most of the time backporting is little work, but sometimes you
need to redo a fix you already did, for a branch which only exist
to be phased out a bit later, in a codebase slightly different in
ways nobody can tell anymore. Sometimes it's even very hard to
backport a fix, but if you don't do it how to tell which branch
has which bugs?
Coupled with being forced to backport every bugfix to every
branch, this can make a compelling enough reason never to
contribute.
With a typical bad fix injection rate of ~5%, this also mean
regressions will crop up in release branches and never be noticed
since they are not introduced at HEAD level but by the very act
of backporting.
I'm not sure it can be done in a way that feels right. I prefer
the N-month release cycle we have, and take as much time and
Release Candidates as needed.
