Re: Development tree, PLEASE?

[Michael Loftis <mloftis@wgops.com>]

--On January 20, 2006 2:03:52 PM -0500 Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:

> But you're perfectly happy to make the kernel developers do the
> equivalent thing when they have to maintain 2 forks (a stable and devel).
> Go back and look at the status of the 2.5 tree - there were *large*
> chunks of time when 2.4 or 2.5 would get an important bugfix, but the
> other tree wouldn't get it for *weeks* because of the hassle of
> cross-porting the patch.

To more fully respond though....

Weeks is fine, and better than never.  And there may be cases in which the 
decision has to be made to 'abandon' a particular stable release in favor 
of a newer version because of the difficulty or inability to backport fixes.

I think that it's fine to push the maintenance effort away from the 
mainline developers, probably even desireable, but then the bugfixing/etc 
tends to happen in a disparate manner, off on lots of forks at different 
places without them making their way back to some central place.

And that seems where we're going with this conversation.  A fork/forks at 
various versions to maintain bugfixes and support updates that's (more?) 
open to submitters writing patches.  Maintained by a separate group or 
party, but with the 'blessing' from mainline to do so.  A place for those 
sorts of efforts to be focused, without necessarily involving the primary 
developers.


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